SYNGROU PRISON

Syngrou Prison was inaugurated in 1887 in the area of Chamosternas, between the present-day municipalities of Petralona and Kallithea. Its construction was funded through a donation by the merchant, banker and national benefactor Andreas Syngros, from whom it took its name, as part of the policy to reorganize the country’s penitentiary system promoted by the then Prime Minister Charilaos Trikoupis.

Syngrou Prison was designed to function as a model correctional institution, incorporating inmate labor, while the system of prisoners’ classification into categories was applied there for the first time. According to a study from 1927:

“The prison complex consisted of a two-storey building with nine wards on the first floor, a church, a hospital, and twenty-six wards on the ground floor, fourteen of which were individual cells for disciplinary punishment. It also included two courtyards for prisoners’ exercise, a small pharmacy, a barber’s room, kitchens, laundries, and separate workshop areas for carpentry, shoemaking, tailoring, blacksmithing, chair making, and other small crafts. In Syngrou Prison the inmates lived communally. Each prisoner slept in an individual bed within wards containing six to ten beds […] Prisoners were classified into categories according to the nature of their offense, their profession, and their age.”¹

From the early 1920s, and especially after 1929, large numbers of members and supporters of the Communist Party of Greece were imprisoned in Syngrou Prison. In April 1931 eight party members escaped in one of the first mass escapes of political prisoners in Greece.

Syngrou Prison had a bad reputation because of the constant overcrowding and the poor living conditions. In 1934 there were 798 prisoners (although the prison’s capacity was 350), crammed into communal wards without beds or blankets — “people living in hell.”²

During the Axis Occupation, Syngrou Prison continued to operate as a correctional facility. In the summer of 1941 it became the first Greek prison forced to accept large numbers of detainees arrested by the Italian and German occupation authorities, even though it had not been officially requisitioned.

The process began on 1 August 1941, when a unit of Carabinieri brought five arrested civilians to Syngrou Prison. However, the prison guard refused to accept detainees without an order from a prosecutor or a Greek court, and their imprisonment was therefore delayed by one day. Following this incident, the Italian authorities demanded that the General Directorate of Prisons admit all arrested individuals without further formalities, except for a written order signed by the competent military authority or unit.³

Based on the number of prisoners, during 1941–1942 Syngrou Prison was the third largest prison in the country, after Averoff Prison and the Eptapyrgio prison in Thessaloniki, holding 860 inmates.⁴

By the summer of 1942 the prison was already overcrowded, and an annex was established in the area of Agios Sostis. Many resistance fighters, communists, and members of the EAM–ELAS organizations were detained there.⁵

After the bombing of Piraeus on 11 January 1944 and the destruction of the correctional prison located there, the prisoners were transferred to Syngrou Prison, raising the total number of inmates to more than 1,000.⁶

During the Greek Civil War, the prison was used for a short period to detain left-wing civilians. From 1947 to 1954 the buildings were used to house civilians from the countryside who had abandoned their homes due to the military operations of the Civil War.

The prison buildings were demolished in 1960 in order to construct workers’ and refugee housing. Today nothing remains of the prison complex.

Footnotes

1. Arg. Koutoulas, Penal Reform Efforts and the Struggle against Criminality among Children and Adolescents in Greece, Athens, 1927, p. 17.

2. “Hell in Syngrou Prison,” newspaper I Drasis, 10 March 1934.

3. General State Archives (GAK), Archive of the Ministry of Justice, File 177, Italian Garrison of Athens to the General Directorate of Prisons, Athens, 4 Aug. 1941.

4. GAK, Archive of the Ministry of Supply, File 99, List of the State’s Prisons and Reformatories with the Number of Personnel and Inmates, n.d. [1941].

5. GAK, Archive of the Ministry of Justice, File 174a, Ministry of Justice / Directorate of Penitentiary Administration to the Hellenic Telephone Company, protocol no. 70066, Athens, 25 Aug. 1942.

6. GAK, Archive of the Ministry of Justice, File 174b, Sub-file 26, Ministry of Justice / Directorate of Penitentiary Administration to the Ministry of Interior / General Directorate / Security Directorate, protocol no. 32050, Athens, 13 June 1944.