I am sure if its wrong please comment to us so 27 years ago today, on July 26, 1999, Phaedon Gizikis death anniversary, a former head of state died quietly in Athens at the age of 82, largely out of public view by then. Phaedon Gizikis had once held the title of President of Greece, though his path to that office and away from it tells a much more complicated story than the title alone suggests.

Gizikis was born in June 1917 in Volos, Greece, and spent his entire adult life as a career army officer. He graduated from the Hellenic Military Academy in 1939 and went on to fight through the Greco-Italian War, the wider Battle of Greece during World War II, and later the brutal Greek Civil War. By the late 1960s he’d become a senior figure within the military establishment, and in 1967 he backed the coup led by Georgios Papadopoulos that installed the military junta widely known as the Regime of the Colonels, a dictatorship that would control Greece for seven years.

Gizikis rose steadily through the ranks during that period, and in November 1973, following an internal power struggle within the junta, he was installed as President of the Republic after Papadopoulos was forced out by fellow officer Dimitrios Ioannidis. Historians generally describe his presidency as a largely figurehead role, with real power resting elsewhere in the military hierarchy. Even so, his tenure ended up carrying real historical weight. The junta collapsed the following year, in July 1974, following its disastrous handling of a coup attempt in Cyprus that triggered a Turkish invasion of the island. In the chaos that followed, Gizikis oversaw the transition back toward civilian rule, remaining in office for four more months in a caretaker capacity while a new constitution was drafted, a period Greeks refer to as the metapolitefsi. keep reading alazizcp.com

He stepped down in December 1974 and retired from military life the same year. Two years later, a military judicial council dropped treason and mutiny charges that had been brought against him and 88 other former officers connected to the dictatorship. Unlike some of the junta’s more central figures, Gizikis largely avoided the harsher legal reckoning that followed Greece’s return to democracy.

After that, he mostly disappeared from public life. Accounts of his final years vary in detail, but most describe him living quietly and largely out of the spotlight until his death in 1999.

His story remains a fairly unusual one in modern political history, a career soldier who ended up holding his country’s highest office almost by circumstance, at the exact moment his government was collapsing around him, and then spent the following quarter century simply out of view,