Kaiti Nisiriou-Zevgou (1903-1980)

“I am descending from a beautiful seaside and once wealthy village of Eastern Thrace, in Propontis, the Epivates, around 60 km west of Constantinople”. Kaiti Nisiriou was born in 1903 and lived her childhood in Constantinople. Her father, a merchant in the city’s central market, died in 1920, while her mother worked as a teacher. After her father’s death and for the period of 1922-25 she taught alongside her mother on the islands of Prigiponissia while living in an orphanage of the Patriarchate in Halki. Finally, they depart Constantinople in 1925, heading to Piraeus since her brother had already established himself in Athens.

After their move to Greece, she was hired in the fall of 1926 at the private Konstantinidis School. There she meets Giannis Talaganis (Zevgos). “Reserved, moderately dressed, mild, and with a book or newspaper in hand he caused many to quickly value him and want to be his friend, while also curiously receiving respect from his peers. These particularities of his character were cultivated inside the Party and remained with him until his last breath”, Kaiti remarks about her encounter with Giannis.

In occupied Athens, Kaiti managed to connect with the party and actively participate in the organization of the resistance movement. Initially, in collaboration with Andreas Tzimas and Kostas Hatzimalis, they attempted to resurrect the party organization of KKE in Athens, in the difficult conditions of an occupied city. She became a founding and leading member of the female group Free Girl and a member of the editorial board of the newspaper Gynaikeia Drasi [Female Action] that according to her was “widely recognized by men and women as the freshest and most sought-after resistance newspapers”.

In the second meeting of the executive board of the KKE in December 1942, Kaiti was elected as a substitute member of the executive board of the Party. “Life in Athens went on illegality, hunger, exhaustion, but with a devilish rigor”, as it was “the period in my political life with the most happiness and best performance”.

She participated in resistance activities, the organization of large protests and strikes (against forced labor mobilization, hunger, etc.), led neighborhood groups across Athens, and organized through the city committee the resistance movement as well as the upper party elections.

A bit before the liberation, her husband Giannis Zevgos participated as a member of EAM in the cabinet of the Government of National Unity with prime minister Georgios Papandreou, taking the post of Minister of Agriculture. The days of liberation were a short break of happiness for the couple. Zevgou describes the day of the liberation of Athens, October 12th, 1944, very vividly: “And as the crowd moved it became a raging river, bellowing more and more. I forgot the ‘urgent’ job I had and I moved towards the center. […] All the big roads of Athens were chock-full of people, Stadiou, Panepistimiou, Akadimias! Around 600 to 700 thousand people flooded the streets from a wartime population of around 1 million people, all of them holding a ‘forest’ of flags that had been prepared earlier for this celebration. EPON members that used to write slogans secretly in the dead of the night with many precautions for fear of their lives for the past years, now in broad daylight –and because the walls were not enough– wrote on the sidewalks, on the pavement of the roads, wherever they could find an opening. […] Everywhere tears of joy and kissing were like Easter Sunday. And was it not a resurrection for us and our people?” Kaiti with her comrade in arms Lefteris Voutsas, riding a German car, drove around Athens with a red KKE flag on the windshield.

The enthusiasm and the joy of liberation did not last long because the negative political events in Greece affected the Communists. The December events, the clash of the English with the guerillas of ELAS, and the end of hostilities after the Varkiza agreements, which stipulated the end of the war and the surrender of the ELAS armaments, marks the beginning of a very difficult and unstable time.

Kaiti was sent by the party in October of 1945 to the city of Volos, to help with the organization of the Party. In the meantime, her daughter Roxanne makes a surprise return to Athens from Moscow, and she meets her parents after 13 years. Her happiness and emotions were enormous since during the war there was no contact between them. “As soon as I opened the door I was met with a young, slim girl, wearing a white coat and holding a blue beret in her hand, trying to communicate with two comrades. ‘My girl, my Roxanne, my child’ I told her as I hugged her, and wet her small head with tears of joy. She gently pushed me and looked at me with curiosity. How does this woman that says she is my mother look?”

For a small period of time the entire family was together again in the spring of 1946, if only for a few months. The murder of her husband Giannis in March 1947 in Thessaloniki by paramilitary actors was the peak of the “white terror” that Greek leftists faced after the liberation. Tragic figures at his funeral were Kaiti and Roxanne that were the only people present since the government rushed to declare the funeral private so as to not create a public upheaval.

During the Civil War (1946-1949) Kaiti continued her illegal work of guiding the party organization of Piraeus. She and her daughter were arrested during one of their secret meetings in May of 1949. In the military courts, she was condemned thrice to life imprisonment and risked being executed. Luckily for her at the time on the floor of the UN, the issue of ending executions in Greece was brought up after a suggestion of the Soviet ambassador, something that saved Kaiti from execution.

During her imprisonment she was a member of the Party Directional Office for a while, and due to her high status in the Party, she and other women were held in isolation in the so called “Epikyndineio” (dangerous cell); there the most hardcore communist women were held that refused to sign away their communist beliefs, thus held away from the general prisoners so as to not influence them. She remained a prisoner for 14 years, from 1949 until 1963, which caused irreparable damage to her physical health.

One of her letters directed to her fellow incarcerated women in April 1963 demonstrates the psychological impacts caused to women by the extended isolation: “I’m emancipated by movement now. In the first days it wasn’t that I just couldn’t move on my own, or orientate myself, but the worst was that I couldn’t dare to walk on my own. […] Now I move comfortably, and the best thing is that wherever I find myself I can orient myself. Athens still seems foreign, like a brainless nouveau riche. As I go around the old neighborhoods I struggle to find my old traces, and I feel the city foreign and unwelcoming”.

After being freed from prison she participated in the United Democratic Left (EDA), the legal party of the Greek Left. She served as head of the Female Assistance Office of EDA, of the Bureau of the Executive Committee of the party that dealt with female issues. She was burdened with organizing the mass female movement. She was also one of the members of the Bureau that was in charge of communicating with international women’s organizations.

During the dictatorship (1967-1974) she was not arrested, she remained illegal and managed to connect with political centers while participating in the anti-dictatorial struggle. As her friend Toula Drakopoulou mentions: “Immediately she began the job she had learned since 1926 when she became a member of KKE. In those moments communists do not wait for guidance, they act independently. In a few days, she managed to connect with many comrades that avoided arrest. She created a team, found a typewriter, and began authoring proclamations”. In the breakup of KKE in 1968 she became a member of KKE Interior and in 1969 was elected a member of the Executive Board of the Party.

At the end of 1970, she managed to escape illegally abroad, where she moved around Paris and Rome. She was active in the anti-dictatorial struggle internationally as a member of the Patriotic Anti-Dictatorial Front (PAM).

After the collapse of the dictatorship, she returns to Greece and continues to be politically active. She is a frontrunner in the movements of the old resistance fighters that mobilize during the democratic reconstruction of the country (Metapolitefsi) with the basic demand of recognizing the National Resistance.

She was a member of the board of the “United National Resistance Movement” and a founding member of the “Woman in Resistance Movement”. Prior to her death, she wrote an autobiographical book of the period 1925-1947, which focuses on her life with her husband Giannis Zevgos. She died unexpectedly after a heart attack in Athens in December 1980 during an event about the Dekemvriana (December events), while she was on the podium speaking about her husband.