Maria Ferla Beikou (1925-2011)

In high school she was forced to join the EON (the youth of the dictator Metaxas) and due to her brother’s illness –after missing a year of school– they became classmates. “So we found ourselves in the same classroom, playing Oedipus Tyrannus together, under his direction, he playing Oedipus and I playing his daughter, with our big scene where he proudly loosened my hair to make it golden in the sun…”. The Occupation finds them in high school. Maria initially joins the National Solidarity, helping the work of the first guerrilla groups with fundraisers, clothes, and supplies. In February 1943, after the founding of the United Panhellenic Youth Organization (EPON), the largest youth resistance organization, she immediately joined it, together with her brother. 

«In Evia we also had clashes and we took part as EPON members, helping the armed forces. EPON had undertaken the enlightenment and above all the cultural sector. We listened to the radio stations at night and put out a bulletin every day. We were dropping the bulletins in people’s homes so they could find out what was going on in the world. (…) We wrote the bulletin on a typewriter and printed it on a polygraph. All illegal, of course. (…) We had the polygraph and the radio in our house, with my brother Giannis. It was dangerous, too dangerous, and we had to break the resistance of our parents”. The parents’ resistance was finally overcome by the persistence and commitment of their two children to the resistance struggle. “Then they helped us. They kept watch when we listened to the radio stations at night. We had a crypt in the yard where we hid the radio during the day”. 

While working in the illegal organization, they left home in order to be safe. However, the organization decided that Maria should return home as they needed a contact person in the village. On her way back, she met a fellow villager who was suspected of collaborating with the occupation forces. This is quickly confirmed, since on the same day, the Italians raid her parent’s house –in the meantime Maria has fled to a neighbouring house– and arrest her father. They took him to the Chalkida Prison. He was released after Italy’s capitulation (Sept. 1943). 

Maria left with two other girls from Istria for the “Free Greece” area in Karpenisi. She joined the XII Division of the ELAS with no training and no combat experience. «Gradually we gathered, from all sectors of the Division, the girls who were scattered in the regiments, the battalions, the companies, and so the women’s platoon was formed. We were sworn in when the two platoons, the girls and the boys, were formed. (…) I was a captain and party secretary in the platoon. As a captain I was in command with Georgia Palligiannopoulou who had attended the ELAS officers’ school in Redina. Georgia, who was a soldier, was in charge of military training, while I was responsible for everything else: enlightenment, behaviour, culture, lessons.” 

After joining the armed forces, she began her military training. The first battle in which she participated was in August 1944 at Karpenisi. The Germans, as part of the clearing operations, finally burned the town. «The fifteenth of August found us outside Karpenisi. It was my name day. The girls were teasing me: ‘Aren’t you going to offer us something?’ I remembered that someone had given me a box of sweetened milk as a present. I opened the box and with a spoon I offered them all. A spoonful to each of them ‘for many years and good battles.’ That was the wish.” 

One of the activities of the armed section of the women was to enlighten the villages about the work of ELAS. They informed them about the resistance movement and about the life they envisioned after liberation, about “justice and equality”. The living conditions were extremely difficult as well as the practical issues of daily life they faced, such as personal hygiene. However, women’s participation in the armed struggle was viewed with great prejudice at the time: “Many people did not look kindly on our participation in the army and many considered us immoral”.

The liberation of the country from the Germans was a unique moment in Maria’s experience of the resistance struggle and she singles it out: «During the liberation, when we entered Lamia, our platoon was at the head of the parade of the XII Division. People had woven wreaths for us, they threw flowers in our wake. It was a frenzy. We had already cut the braids and started styling our hair because we were now free. We tried to look pretty. We had ironed our pants, we made sure we had clean shirts. All khaki, military. Everything became more formal…”. ASKI_Beikou_07.jpg

After the liberation, during the Decemvriana (Dec. 1944) with the retreat of ELAS from Athens, she meets her future husband Georgoulas Beikos. They married in November 1945, in Lamia. They could not go to Istiaia –her hometown– since she could be arrested. They stayed in Lamia for a few months and GB worked at the newspaper of EAM Roumeli. In April 1946, Georgoulas is arrested because of an article in the newspaper and Maria goes to Athens to be safer. ASKI_Beikou_08.jpg

There she met her brother Giannis. They found a job in a photo studio in Gennadios Street and settled in a room in Kesariani. Her husband was being held in Averoff prison in Athens, so at least during this time she could visit him. Due to the difficult living conditions Maria fell ill with tuberculosis in the spring of 1947 and at the same time her brother was arrested and exiled. She is left alone in Athens and the grip tightens as the persecution intensifies.

«The first thing I told the women when we formed the platoon was that they had to wear trousers as women did in the ELAS. But they didn’t want to. (…) They carried them in their backpacks and didn’t wear them. I did, along with a few others, until the first raid. Our platoon had a big tent where we were all together. We reported every morning. One morning, just as we were reporting, a mortar shell hits the tent. We had just come out. If we’d been inside, we’d have been killed. The tent was destroyed, but the military bags were saved. Then the clashes with the army began and they were forced to wear trousers. They couldn’t do otherwise. So the trouser issue was resolved”. 

In the Democratic Army Maria had an executive role as she was in charge of the whole Division and had to monitor all the units where women were involved, follow their progress and encourage them. “They had to become combative. Through discussions they understood a lot and learned to fight”. Conditions in central and southern Greece were more difficult than in the north during the civil war and many times they had to fight during the day and march at night without having eaten. “At night when we marched, we would put a piece of paper on the back of the person in front of us or a handkerchief –if we had a white handkerchief– so that we could follow the convoy and not get lost. Many times we slept on the road, we slept standing up while walking and even had dreams. When we stopped moving, the one behind us would come, push you awake and move on.”

In February 1949, she left Karpenisi in order to attend the Conference of the Panhellenic Democratic Union of Women (PDEG) held in Vitsi at the beginning of March. Maria representing the 1st Division of Thessaly spoke at the conference, where representatives of the women’s movement from abroad –mainly from Eastern European countries– were present.  “My speech made a great impression, because I told them about the conditions of the Democratic Army in southern Greece. (…) The emotion was widespread in the room especially when I mentioned the sad events of the chase and the death of many women fighters. I too, at one moment while I was speaking, cried”. 

With the retreat of the IDF in late August 1949, Maria crossed the Albanian border and after staying for about a month in Burrel, Albania, they finally boarded a ship to Tashkent in the USSR. She settled there with the other fighters, as political refugees. She occasionally worked in factories but her failing health did not help her. At the same time she started learning Russian. The loneliness and sadness she felt at first were very intense: “I remember when I was in the 4th state, in Tashkent, on Sunday I was going to a little river that ran through the state and there was a weeping willow and I was sitting under the willow and crying. Sunday was the only time I could cry. I was all alone. I had no family, no one at all.”

Then, in February 1952, she went to Moscow where she worked for 27 years as an announcer for the Greek broadcast of the Moscow Radio Station. At the same time, she studied at the Moscow Film Institute, with Mikhail Romm as her professor and Andrei Tarkovsky as a fellow student and close friend. During her studies, in the third year students had to make a film. At Tarkovsky’s suggestion, Maria and another fellow student, decided to make a film based on E. Hemingway’s short story “The Killers”. The film was completed, but for many years it was lost, until 2005 when it was found and re-released.

In December 1959 Georgoulas Beikos was released from prison and finally managed to go to Moscow in April 1961, as an accredited correspondent of the newspaper Avgi. Maria met her partner again after sixteen years and went to Odessa to pick him up from the ship: “He finally came down. How to describe such moments! Only those who have experienced something similar can understand. At first we felt awkward. Slowly we began to get used to it. We left immediately by train and arrived in Moscow. (…) Georgoulas was very sensitive and I didn’t know how to behave. Everything had to start all over again and we didn’t know how. The love was there, that was self-evident for both of us. There were no moments of doubt. But physical intimacy was far away, and we had to approach it again with care, slowly. The loneliness had numbed me. I had to get used to it again.” 

In the following years they stayed in Moscow, working and making contacts with many intellectuals and Greek artists who from the 1960s began to increase their visits to the USSR. Their life was very different from that of other Greek political refugees, mainly because of their professional identity, which allowed them to associate with the intellectual elites of their time.

Georgoulas’ unexpected death in 1975 devastated Maria, who also lost her job at the radio station. She was repatriated in 1976. She worked professionally as a translator for the Great Soviet Encyclopedia and as an agent for the visit of Soviet artists to Greece in the office of Theodoros Kritas. In 2010 she published her autobiographical book, Afou me rotate, na thimitho… (Since you asked me, I will remember…).”

Shortly before her death, in 2010, she starred in Theodoros Terzopoulos’ theatrical adaptation of Heiner Müller’s play “Mauser”. She died in Athens on 28 March 2011, after a long battle with cancer.