12 Facts About Nikos Beloyannis

Nikos Beloyannis was a Greek resistance leader and leading cadre of the Greek Communist Party.

Nikos Beloyannis came from a relatively prosperous family and went on to study law in Athens, but before being able to graduate, he was arrested and jailed in the Akronauplia prison by the Ioannis Metaxas regime in the 1930s and transferred to the Germans after the Axis occupation of Greece.

Nikos Beloyannis escaped in 1943 and joined the Greek People's Liberation Army in Peloponnese on the side of Aris Velouchiotis.

In June 1950, Beloyannis returned to Greece in order to re-establish the Athens organization of the Communist Party of Greece that had been declared illegal.

Nikos Beloyannis was accused of treason, allegedly having transmitted information to the Soviet Union.

The Nikos Beloyannis trial started in Athens on 19 October 1951.

Nikos Beloyannis denied all accusations and stressed the patriotic nature of his actions during the anti-Nazi resistance, the British intervention and the Greek Civil War.

Nikos Beloyannis became globally known as the "Man with the Carnation" and as such, he was depicted in a famous Pablo Picasso sketch.

Nikos Beloyannis made an impassioned defense of the achievements of the resistance and exposed the fact that in the postwar years people who had fought the Nazis were persecuted for their left-wing views, while Nazi collaborators were rewarded with posts in the Greek government due to the Cold War atmosphere.

The sentences of the other co-defendants of Nikos Beloyannis were commuted to life imprisonment, and by the mid-1960s, all were released from prison.

Nikos Beloyannis was the one of the most prominent of the Greeks who collaborated with the Soviet Union after World War II.

Nikos Beloyannis's name was given to the village of Beloiannisz, Hungary, which housed Greek left-wing refugees who fled Greece at the end of the civil war until they were allowed to return to Greece by the first Andreas Papandreou government in the early 1980s.