Yannis Tamtakos
Greek political activist
Yannis Tamtakos (Greek: Γιάννης Ταμτάκος; 1908 – January 4, 2008) was a Greek political activist, initially a Trotskyist and later in life an anarchist. Due to his political activity, he was chased by the Axis forces, the Greek state, and the National Liberation Front. For several years before his death, he was the oldest surviving participant of the 1936 Thessaloniki strike.
Biography
Tamtakos took part in every workers' struggle in Thessaloniki as a shoemaker, having been elected committee member (1926–1927) and secretary (1928–1929) of the Union of the Shoemakers of Thessaloniki. Later, he became active through the Union of the Unemployed. In 1931, while on the front line of a demonstration of the unemployed, in Syntrivani Square in Thessaloniki, he was attacked by a group of policemen, led by the nephew of the Head of the Police; he was shot in the cheek, and the bullet cut his tongue. He did not lose his ability to speak, thanks to surgery.
Tamtakos and his comrades were persecuted by the German occupiers, the Security Battalions, but also by the anti-fascist National Liberation Front (EAM). He managed to escape assassination efforts by EAM quite a few times while he used several identities and nicknames during the period of the occupation and of the liberation of Greece.
In Dekemvriana, he accused the forces of EAM of carrying out a Stalinist coup d'état.
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This entry incorporates text from “Yannis Tamtakos” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.