The Kallithea Prison was in the current block bounded by Eleftherios Venizelos Avenue (Thiseos) – Skopeftiriou – Platonos and Filaretou Streets. The building was constructed in 1896 as an Olympic Shooting Range to host the shooting competitions of the Olympic Games that took place in Athens that same year and was designed by the leading architect Anastasios Metaxas. After the Games and until 1925, the building was rarely used as a shooting range, while at the same time the area it occupied was reduced and part of the complex was handed over for school use. From 1925 to 1940, two primary schools were housed there.
During the Occupation, they were converted into prisons under the administration of the Italian authorities (until September 1943) and were the most important prisons for Italian prisoners in the capital after the Averof prison, resistance fighters and civilians arrested for participating in anti-occupation activities, and officers considered dangerous to the Occupation authorities. A group transfer took place on 5 March 1943, when 41 people arrested during a demonstration against conscription were transferred there. One of them, Giorgos Tzinis, describes his entry into the chamber: “Before I went in, I took off my shoes and left them outside the door. The entire small chamber, along its entire length and width, was covered with rags and colorful village blankets. I walked inside, stepping on the blankets with my socks. I felt suffocated and looked around for a window to breathe. The window I saw had been bricked up. Only high up had they left a skylight, and that was closed with bars. At that moment, I felt imprisoned.”[1] In April 1943, there were 633 prisoners in Kallithea Prison, while the capacity was estimated at 450.[2] Two months later, the Ministry of Justice reported that the prisons “were overcrowded in a manner that posed serious risks to public health, without taking into account the adverse living conditions of the prisoners due to the lack of space.”[3]
Prisoners were often tortured by the Carabinieri and members of the Italian secret service: “They revived medieval torture methods and added new varieties to them. Apart from the cane, hot eggs under the armpits, burning the fingers and stretching the bodies according to the Procrustes system, they considered the iron crown to be more effective in discovering the truth. It was tightened around the prisoner’s head and the pain in the temples was unbearable. It was used frequently. In the Kallithea prison, they used it in the Maratheas case [a collaborationist landowner killed by ELAS] with such ferocity that twenty prisoners, to be freed from the torment, each confessed separately that they had killed Maratheas![4]
After the Italian capitulation, the prison came under German jurisdiction. Until the end of the Occupation, the number of inmates fluctuated between 300 and 500 on average.[5] After 1945, the Kallithea Prisons continued to operate as prisons for political prisoners. In 1951, members of the clandestine KKE group who had reentered Greece illegally, Belogiannis, Argyriadis, Batsis and Kaloumenos were imprisoned there and executed in March 1952. The prison ceased operations in 1965 and was demolished in 1966. A school complex was built in its place, which today houses two schools, the 4th Gymnasium and Lyceum and the 10th Gymnasium of Kallithea (175 El. Venizelos Avenue).
[1] Tzinis, Bloodstained Notebooks, p. 33.
[2] Karavis, The Italian Occupation of Greece, p. 281.
[3] GRGSA, Ministry of Justice Archive, f. 176, Greek State, Ministry of Justice/Directorate of Penitentiary Administration to the Ministry of Public Security/General Directorate of the Gendarmerie, AP 41304, 11.6.1943
[4] Koukkidis, Their Justice, p. 66.
[5] DAEES Archive, TB No. 15, EES Prisoners’ Office to the Medicine Distribution Committee, AP 13106, Athens, 7.10.1943.
