Word: kalavryta
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High up in the mountains of the Peloponnesus, Kalavryta (the name means "beautiful springs") was once razed in Roman times. The Romans used it as a watering place; so, later, did the Franks and Turks. In 1821 Archbishop Germanos, of Kalavryta's ancient monastery, began the Greek War of Independence (against the Turks) by raising the Cross at Kalavryta...
Last week an old man called "Barba," a patriarch of the mountain town of Kalav-ryta, sighed and said: "The blood my family has shed in Kalavryta would fill three whole barrels...
...World War II, Kalavryta came to be known as the "Lidice of Greece." The Germans, angered by Partisan resistance, marched in during the winter of 1943 and summoned the entire population (about 2,000) to the main square. The men were led away and machine-gunned. Under the heaps of dead, eleven survived. The women & children were locked in a schoolhouse which, along with the rest of Kalavryta, was put to the torch. A horror-stricken Austrian soldier unbolted the schoolhouse door and some women escaped...
After the war, the town was partly rebuilt. New people came from the countryside; the population rose toward the prewar level. Kalavryta still had its beautiful springs and its luminous mountain...
Almost every village had stories to tell of German torture chambers, narrow boxes studded with nails in which men were forced to stand until they fell exhausted. At Kalavryta the Nazis had machine-gunned the entire male population -700 men and boys. Some 1,300 women and girls escaped only because an Austrian soldier let them out of a burning building. The Germans shot...