Desecration of the Jewish cemetery of Ioannina, January 2019
On March 25, 1944, the Greek police authorities surrounded the houses of the Jews in Ioannina city and send them to the trucks that drove them to detention camps and from there, subsequently, they were deported them to the extermination camps. March 25 happens to be the Greek national holiday, leaving no room for doubt that the Nazis chose this very specific date to execute their plan on purpose. Out of the approximately 2.000 Jews arrested on this day in Ioannina, fewer than 200 eventually managed to survive. Similar to the events occurred in other Greek cities, the Jewish homes were looted and “confiscated” by the Christian mob and the Greeks collaborating with the Germans.
Following the events of WW2, the city authorities decided to settle their “unfinished business” with the few Jews who managed to return to the city after the Holocaust. The Jewish community of Ioannina at that point of time was small in numbers and thus unable to effectively defend its rights, providing the Greeks with the opportunity to presume upon them. As a result, in the 1940s, the Μunicipality of Ioannina began to covet the lot where the Jewish cemetery was built. To make matters worse, in the late 1960s the Greek state decided to take the Jewish Community of Ioannina to court under the pretext of some hasty property titles dating back to the depths of historical time, claiming the Greek state’s ownership over the cemetery.[1] Even though the trial ended in the 1980s in favor of the Jewish Community, the local authorities did not abandon their efforts, and later that same decade tried to entice the members of the Community by offering them plots outside the city to create a new cemetery. Finally, in 1988, an agreement between the two parties was reached, according to which the Municipality accepted the ownership of the Israeli Community on the cemetery site, in exchange for a small plot of land, offered by the Community to build a park (the park is currently named “Ulof Palme” Park).
Despite the agreement, the Greek authorities attempted a plethora of underground and bureaucratic smuggling efforts in the following years. For example, in the late 1990s, the Israelite community was taken by surprise when it discovered that the Jewish cemetery of Ioannina had been illegally categorised by the Municipality of Ioannina -through the modification of the city’s urban plan- as “public area”, intended by the city authorities to be used in order to raise a school! Thenceforth, the efforts of the Municipality to turn the Jewish cemetery into a “public area” intensified even more.[2]
During the 2000s, the Municipality attempted, without any success, to characterize the cemetery as a “grove”. Its failure, nevertheless, led it to enrich its means in order to achieve its goals; from that point of time, its efforts no longer followed the official route, neither only included urban planning illegalities. In fact, throughout the 2000s, the people of Ioannina, who were balking to accept the fact that some of the Jews of Ioannina survived, declared a war of nerves against them and showed through underground action that they were determined to finish the work of the Nazi Germans. In other words, they invented their own Nazi methods.
The most clear-cut example is the following: On April 14-15, 2002, a Christian neighbor of the Jewish cemetery heard some noises from inside of it and decided to call the police. The police officers who arrived at the scene, proceeded to arrest some of their colleagues (serving to the Drug Prosecution Department in Ioannina), who were found inside the cemetery. The very next morning, members of the Community discovered that swastikas had been drawn on the cemetery graves. As a result, an SAI (Sworn Administrative Inquiry) was ordered, which (to no one’s surprise) ended up fruitless, apparently without any arrests been made.[3] And this, was not the only incident.
On October 8, 2003 some other “strangers” drew swastikas on the walls of the Jewish cemetery. On February 26, 2007, a swastika appeared again on the cemetery door. The same thing happened on March 25, 2008 and again on January 21, 2009.
In 2009, the Jewish cemetery and the Jewish Holocaust memorial were vandalized three more times, first in March and then again on June 3, when eight graves were found broken. A disturbing fact about the last desecration is that the perpetrators killed a turtle and smeared the graves with its blood.” The president of the community, Moisis Elisaf, who saw his own mother’s grave getting destroyed, accused the police of showing complete reluctance to arrest the perpetrators, or even prevent similar incidents in the future.”[4] Following this desecration, a “strict police surveillance” of the cemetery was decided, which had no effect however, since two other graves were discovered crashed on the night of July 8. Nevertheless, these desecrations were followed by silence for a long time, as on August 4, 2009, a corrective modification of the urban plan of Ioannina was published in the Government Gazette, according to which the cemetery site was no longer characterized as a “public area”.[5]
In fact, the Jews of Ioannina realized that is impossible to get away with the local misconducts and, consequently, decided to seek further institutional protection for their cemetery. Due to their efforts, in 2012, the Ministry of Culture officially designated the biggest part of the cemetery as a historic site. However, the desecrations were far from over.
On August 4, 2016, a “confrontation” unfolded in the press, between a “journalist” of the right-wing newspaper Proinos Logos of Ioannina and the president of the Jewish community – a confrontation that was later carried on, on social media. In particular, the aforementioned columnist, who later worked for conspiracy theory websites, claimed that “the Jewish lobby” pulled the strings and imposed to the hospital of Ioannina to hire Dr. Moisis Elisaf. In the rest of his article, he cursed Israel, which also blamed for the “extermination” of the Palestinians, claimed that the Jews are “making use of the Holocaust” as a propaganda tool, and then proceeded with a racist barrage against Muslim “illegal immigrants” who attempt the “Islamisation” of the country.[6] The capstone of this “public debate” took place on September 16, 2016, when swastikas were drawn (again) on the walls of the Jewish synagogue.
During this year, 2021, two more desecrations occurred, on August 7 and September 11[7], respectively, both resulting in broken graves. The day before the desecration of August, a prophetic article in the right-wing newspaper Proinos Logos stated that there are so many branches, garbage and pine forest trees placed next to peoples’ houses in Ioannina city, that it is rather likely some of them one day to catch a fire! The author also added that “the Jewish cemetery, which is located next to our houses, contains numerous dry trees, a fact that frightens me of what might happen there as well, in the near future. Maybe it’s high time for us to address this problem, so that we can prevent the worst”[8].
A state-backed network of power
Based on the aforementioned incidents, the conclusion is drawn that the Jewish cemetery in Ioannina has caught, over the previous years and until now, the eye of Hitler’s successors, even though these perpetrators do not have a short mustache, do not stand at attention wearing boots and do not shout “Sieg Hail”! In our humble opinion, our effort to gather and highlight the history of desecration in Ioannina as it is written above, saves us from being trapped in complete confusion. Because based on this work, we are able to conclude that the perpetrators are not generally and vaguely antisemites, that antisemitism is not just a feature of cavemen and an irrational ideology of some people who “did not learn their lesson” from the Holocaust, and also that the perpetrators apparently are not neo-Nazis – a subject that, anyway, has been rare in Ioannina in recent years, as our comrades living there recently assured us.
After all, how is it possible that there is not a single swastika drawn in the entire city of Ioannina but, at the same time, lots of them appear on the walls of the Jewish cemetery? How is it possible that the “neo-Nazis” did not involve into any Nazi activities during 2021 in Ioannina, except the two desecrations of the Jewish cemetery – which, in addition, took place very close together (one month difference)? And, after all, how is it possible that the supposedly men of neo-Nazi beliefs who, according to our timeline, should have been living in Ioannina city already for twenty years, have not yet been arrested by the most experienced state institution of the city over the last century, the Security Department of Ioannina’s Police?
Knowing the local history allows us, in our opinion, to realize what lies behind the desecrations of the Jewish cemetery in Ioannina. Ioannina, like every borderland and “nationally sensitive” region, is full of all kinds of secret services and nationalist officials of the Greek state. Therefore, Greek authorities do not lack of manpower to commit acts of vandalism. Throughout Macedonia and Epirus, the state controls enough people not to be in need of neo-Nazis to get its job done. As a result, we state the blatant fact that those who paint swastikas in the Jewish cemetery, they do so in order to distract everyone.
There also exists a second point that we want to include in our analysis: not everyone in Ioannina (or elsewhere) felt sorry for the loss of the city’s Jewish community. There were many in the city who rejoiced, as one realizes when inspecting the relevant historical literature, and also many who subsequently morally justified – both inwardly and publicly – the extermination of the Romaniote Jews during the Holocaust. However, not all of them were Nazis; some of them were, as well, simple members of the local Christian community, including shopkeepers, owners, lower and upper middle class, local rulers, journalists and, of course, police officers. For example, in the record of desecrations we presented, it is easy to see that the protagonists of the desecration of 2002 were police officers and, at the same time, no one of those living in Ioannina took exception to this profanation. In addition, it is important to highlight that the desecration which took place on July 8, 2009, was actually attempted during a period when the cemetery was supposedly “under strict police surveillance”. Even the journalists of the city and the president of the Jewish Community himself decided to stand up and confront the police neglect. That is the quality of the members of the Ioannina society which are involved in this series of vandalism acts taking place 20 years already.[9]
Our analysis, thus, allows us to claim that during the whole post-Holocaust era, there exists in Ioannina a network of power, which extends to the whole city and connects the subjects we described above, that is, state apprentices, police officers and their friends. Moreover, the superiors of this network’s members cook plans on how to haul off (or even destroy!) the Jewish cemetery from the city. Their purposes do not originate neither from pure ideology nor from some primordial irrational antisemitic hatred, supported by their lack of education. On the contrary, the perpetrators and their bosses act completely rationally and are fully aware of what they seek: they want to rob the bargain lot where the Jewish cemetery is located from the Jewish Community, an ambition that cannot be publicly confessed.
From our point of view, the way we suggest everyone to see the desecrations of the Jewish cemetery in Ioannina, is not just the only solid way to interpret these events, but, moreover, a helpful guide for anyone to go through the Holocaust itself (not explicitly in Ioannina, but everywhere). Even though the Holocaust was executed on a German-state initiative, it is of high importance to keep in mind that many Nazi accomplices existed within all the states and the great majorities of antisemitic Europe. Nowadays, 77 years after the Jew of Ioannina were taken from their homes, despite the fact that the antisemitic beliefs – and the materialistic benefits originating from them – still thrive, many things have shifted on a symbolic level: the bystanders and those who “sit-on-the-fence” abstaining from taking any action can be found everywhere, even in university departments filled with “sensitive” students and, why not, even professors teaching Jewish and Holocaust history; the ridiculous, though dangerous, neo-Nazi gangs drawing swastikas became a pretext for any use; the former accomplices of the Nazis have been promoted and assigned with leading roles in the elimination of the Jewish presence and heritage in Ioannina city; and finally, the ones who still try to resist, apart from the Jews who have any right to defend their own communities, that is, people like us, comprise the united enemies of the state fascism. And there are many of us out there.
antifa negative, 15.9.2021
// Read here this text in Greek //
[1] “A historic site in Ioannina”, Archaelogy Newsroom, 06.04.2012, https://www.archaiologia.gr/blog/2012/04/06/ένας-ιστορικός-τόπος-μέσα-στα-ιωάννιν/
[2] “The ghost that doesn’t go away”, Inside Story, V Aggeli and G. Tsantikos, 22.09.2016, https://typos-i.gr/article/fantasma-poy-den-feygei
[3] “The ghost that doesn’t go away”, ibid.
[4] “The Jewish cemetery of Ioannina was vandalized (again), Abravanel, 06.06.2009, https://abravanel.wordpress.com/2009/06/06/jewish-cemetery-again-vandalized/. The statements of the president of the community here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kWvGe0gcS3Y.
[5] “A historic site in Ioannina”, ibid
[6] “What’s with Jews’ persistence to… constantly honor them”, Kostas Kaltsis, Proinos Logos , 04.08.2016 and “Did the Jews imposed Mr. Elisaf as the deputy director of the hospital?”, on Kaltsis’ personal blog.
[7] “Vandalism acts in the Jewish cemetery for the second time”, Alexandros Papadopoulos, Eleutheria , 11.09.2021, https://www.ele.gr/?p=66965
[8] “It would be better…”, Propagation Column, Proinos Logos, 06.08.2021, https://www.proinoslogos.gr/monimes-stiles/διαδόσεις/68932
[9] In the 9th issue of 151 magazine, we published a text on the occasion of our presence at the 10th Balkan Anarchist Book Festival, in June 2016. In that text we pointed out that antisemitism is not a-forgotten-in-the-depths-of-time-phenomenon but is still present (in Ioannina as well). And while we were tracking down the contents of the antisemitic discourse, we were unable to connect, in the here and now, the series of the antisemitic attacks being attempted in Greece to the materialistic aspirations of the Greek state, at the level of local administration. See “Balkan Anarchist Bookfair 2016 Ioannina: Response from the event of 0151», 0151 #09, pages 3-5, in https://0151.espivblogs.net/files/2016/10/balkan-anarchist-festival-9.pdf
