The “Colonels,” as the Greek military junta comes to be known, have misruled the country from 1967, alternating between policies that are heavy-handed and absurd.

The regime, under Georgios Papadopoulos, is notorious for torturing political prisoners, forbidding dissent and free speech, and attempting to control university education and rewrite textbooks; its drastic conservatism leads to bans on miniskirts for women and long hair for men and on the writings of Aristophanes, William Shakespeare, and Anton Chekhov, among others.

As exiled Greek intellectuals and leftists scatter across Europe, the regime is widely condemned by other Western countries, though the U.S. government supports it for its anticommunist stance.