Argiro Polichronaki Kokovli (1927-2019)

In May of 1941, at a very young age, Argiro experienced the bloody Battle of Crete, the attempt of the Nazi paratroopers to capture the island. She describes that “for days the island had been pummeled non-stop, with an almost demonic intent, by the airforce of the Third Reich, which seemed to want to destroy everything, to rip the hearts out of the locals using fear, destruction and mayhem”. In August of 1941, after the occupation of the island by the Germans she experienced the punitive executions of the residents of the neighboring village: 140 people of the village Alikianos and the surrounding areas were massacred,  including the husband of her sister and his two brothers. Argiro, a young child supported her 20-year-old widowed sister with her 3 children, taking care of her nieces in a house “clad in black…with the orphans starving and me not being able to give them anything” so that their mother could work the fields and make enough money to feed the children.

At the age of 16-17, Argiro joined the “Αetopoula” (young eagles) and EPON. The reason is that her village, Drakona was an EAM hotbed, and the regional committee of EAM as well as the Committee of EPON in Crete had their headquarters there, including the resupply base of the 5th division of ELAS. However, in a conservative society like Crete, patriarchal notions were very strong, and her mobilization in the resistance was frowned upon by her social circles. Despite her father also serving in EAM, he was against his daughter joining: “A young girl”, he said, “is not allowed to leave her home, to meet young men, to write slogans on the walls, to scream propaganda through the megaphones. To run around at night, these are jobs for men. The women should help differently.” It wasn’t only her father and mother that thought this way, it was the dominant belief. “Even the young men that belonged in the same organizations as us did not want their sisters to be like us, comrades of theirs”. She exclaimed “It was very difficult to clash with your family, your social circles, and even with yourself. To disregard the beliefs that wanted the women exclusively inside the house, away from any other activities and participation in the public sphere, that underestimate your physical and mental strengths and abilities.”

In her village, one of the most mountainous in the region of Chania, the persecuted guerilla fighters would find refuge, with some of them even staying in their home. Argiro and other EPON girls stood watch to protect them, they took care of the injured, sowed and cleaned their uniforms from lice, and wove clothes. But they also had an even more difficult task, as the guerilla groups that were active in the inhospitable mountainous areas of Crete, required frequent resupply. Thus “they had learned to fulfill tasks that the fight asked of them. They wouldn’t ask or consider if it was hard. They felt an obligation towards the goal of freedom, ever since they joined the organization. The groups, the outing, all those leisurely activities that their age demanded were sidelined to the activities for the common goal: kicking out the invaders” as she recalls.

On an inaccessible mountaintop above Argiro’s village, the guerilla fighters had installed a radio system and its operators. Her team, after giving them food, equipment, and information, received the messages from the radios, walked through the night in rough terrain and transmitted the news in the local village, while other times they wrote slogans on the walls. Thus, when Argiro and other EPON girls were given the responsibility to go to the snow-covered outpost to reinforce the guerillas there with building materials to shelter from the cold, they did not hesitate, they carried sheet metal on their backs and scaled the frozen paths wearing handmade wooden shoes or shoes with holes in them, they avoided a German outpost and managed to reach the top.

The liberation of the island from the Germans took longer than the rest of Greece, as the Germans withdrew 9 months later, in July of 1945. Crete however, experienced the post-Dekemvriana conflicts and terror. The EAM village of Argiro found itself in the eye of the storm, as the civil war broke out viciously and divided the island’s people.

Thus Argiro, overcoming her fears, decided to take to the mountains and meet up with her guerilla brother, who had for a while escaped to mountainous Crete, joined by other comrades and family members from their village. “That time for a girl that was being chased for her beliefs alone, there was no other choice if she wanted to maintain her freedom and dignity…” For this decision of hers, she was met with intense protest from her family. Her father had accepted the flight of his son to the mountain but “he could not believe that his daughter would be in the mountains with the guerillas” and he had found a safe house for her to escape to, which Argiro refused. Thus, Argiro escaped to the Omalos plateau and there she met units of the Democratic Army of Greece (DSE) and she joined the female fighters. Amongst them was her cousin Athina. “Thirteen, thirteen female fighters we have, and with you fourteen. We have overcome the unlucky number…” a comrade of hers explained to her. Having injured legs from the hike, she was given boots. “I took them in my arms as if they were the most expensive gift in my life”. She was given a tunic and pants as well as an old rifle, a Manlicher. She held it with pride and awe. Overcoming any fears, Argiro who used to be afraid to look at her father’s hunting rifle that hung on the wall, learned to disassemble and assemble her weapon, she learned to shoot and simultaneously took on various duties (night watches, patrols, manning outposts) but she also repaired clothes. Her stay in the mountainous areas of Crete was very difficult. She had to contend both with the inhospitable weather, the cold, and the lack of provisions and support but also the constant movements, the case, the cleansing operations by the army, the bombings by the panes, the ambushed by the gendarmerie and the armed conflicts. When she called the mountain that overlooked her village she already knew that it had been burned, she saw her destroyed home –four black walls without a roof– her pain for her parents that lost the gains of a lifetime of work was insurmountable.

In 1947, in the mountains as a 20-year-old, she met Nikos Kokovlis (1920-2012), who gave her his rations for her to eat. Nikos Kokovlis hailed from a refugee’s family that moved to Crete. He was a member of EAM (member of the committee of the city of Chania) and the secretary of the Workers Center of Chania after the liberation. Having endured persecution by the state and paramilitary organizations, he decided to flee to the mountains. Despite both of them being in illegality, they worked in different areas and were parts of different groups, thus their first meeting did not initially progress much. Simultaneously for the communists it was believed that between the two sexes, relationships had to be clearly comrade based. As Argiro mentioned “it was pointless, if not inappropriate to dream. Today we are struggling, we fight the good fight. War! Nothing else was of importance.”

Towards the end of the Civil War, the guerrillas in the mountains of Crete were far fewer, and due to the endless persecution, the organization had shrunk or been disbanded. With the end of the war, Nikos Kokovlis and Argiro Polichronaki met again, and in 1950 they began their life and struggle together –they married in 1962 in the USSR– committed to continuing living illegally and hounded. Together with them were another 12 people, the ones that had not been arrested or killed, including the sister of Nikos, Pagona. They were all hunted, with a bounty of 250.000 each. From the mountainous caves that they hid in initially, they came down to the plains so that they can access the city of Chania more easily and resurrect illegal party organizations. The hardships were extreme, the illegality heavy, the chase of the terror, and the frequent increase of their bounties continued incessantly. Under these conditions, Argiro was in charge of the illegal EPON in Chania from 1951 and simultaneously worked in the secret printing mechanism.

Under this extreme secrecy, Argiro and her husband managed to evade arrest for 12 years, despite the state unleashing large operations to catch them alive or dead. Hiding in crypts built specifically as hideouts for many days, with the support of friends, they continued their work in the illegal organizations until 1958-1959 when they accepted the party directive for their disbandment. “The people helped us, there were those that were ideologically opposed, but did not give up even after being tortured” Argiro mentioned.

Cut off from her familial environment, Argiro distinctively remembers the random encounters with family members. Once, the house that they hid in at Chania was visited by her niece, the daughter of her sister without Argiro knowing, who introduced herself with the alias Athina, she did not reveal herself to her. The same had happened a while before with a cousin of hers, who was organized in EPON, who did not recognize her and ironically boasted about his cousin, not realizing he was speaking to her. He even wondered if she was alive as in her village they had held a memorial service for her. Argiro could not reveal herself, “and tell him it’s me, nor could ask for her parents, and what happened in the village during those turbulent years. These are the unwritten rules of being illegal. If you did not follow them, you were lost, together with those who helped you”, she recalls.

In 1962 Argiro and Nikos were given the order to escape. They are ferried off the island with fake papers first to Athens and then by a fishing boat to Italy; then by train to Budapest and finally to Tashkent (Uzbekistan). Argiro recalls that “the escape was very difficult, very dangerous, a ‘salto mortale’, persecuted, outlaws, in a police state, without papers and passports and attempting a long and arduous journey, reaching the USSR after 5 months” In the meantime the local authorities in Crete did not know that they had escaped abroad, thus they remained declared outlaws for another 14 years.

The first thing Argiro did in the USSR was to study. Something that was not easy, because she had to financially survive in a foreign country, but also because she did not know the language, which hindered her political pursuits. Argiro turned toward the field of communications and political science in journalism. Her husband Nikos took the position on the editorial board of the newspaper of the Greek political refugees Neos Dromos (New Road) and Argiro was a regular partner of the newspaper. The conclusion of her studies coincided with the ideological issues within the communist movement, the breakup of the KKE –that happened during the dictatorship in Greece– and the events in Czechoslovakia (1968). Argiro took the side of the regenerative wing, which was critical of the USSR. Ιn a foreign country and an unfriendly environment by her old comrades, she was sidelined from any attempt to publish and work as a reporter, even for her husband.

After the fall of the dictatorship, during the first years of the Metapolitefsi (regime change) she and her husband were denied to return to Greece six times, and they finally returned in April of 1976. One of the first things they did was to search the White Mountains for the bones of a comrade, the “captain” Vaggelio Kladou that had been killed during the civil war in an inaccessible area. They remained for career reasons in Athens and after their pension was approved, they returned permanently to their home, Chania. Argiro did not just coexist with her husband only during their turbulent life but shared with him her literary journey. They co-wrote five books, memories from their turbulent life, but also tales of the guerrillas in the mountains of Crete. She died in Crete in March 2019. When asked in an interview (Haniotika Nea, 07/03/1999) if she would follow the same path if she was 20 years old, Argiro Kokovli express the wish that Greece never experience such situations again but stated boldly that it was a struggle that was deeply humanitarian, and she would do it again.