Fifty years later, read why without the Polytechnic there would be no post-junta democracy. The Polytechnic uprising was a spontaneous – without party guidance – culmination in the struggle for freedom and democracy.

It was powerfully etched in the popular consciousness because it embodied the concept of "sacrifice," which serves as a marker for nations and peoples. It is one of the historical events that every nation needs to maintain its self-respect.

The student movement was the one that forced the dictator Papadopoulos to initiate the Markezinis experiment to politically legitimize his regime. If that maneuver had succeeded, Greece would have been trapped in a pseudo-parliamentary system under tutelage.

The November uprising opened the way for the fall of the dictatorship, even if the catalyst was the tragedy of Cyprus. In this sense, the Polytechnic is the founding "myth" of post-junta democracy. Every major historical event, after all, takes on the dimensions of a "myth."

Without the Polytechnic, Greece might have followed a path similar to that of Chile: The bloodstained dictator Pinochet took power in a coup in 1973 and remained in power (as president and head of the Armed Forces) until 1998! He never went to prison!

The political leaders of the post-junta period owe their careers to the "radical movement" of the student movement, which enforced the occupation. Had the Polytechnic not intervened, the parties would have been forced to operate for at least eight years within the suffocating framework of the over-concentrated powers of the dictator-president Papadopoulos.

Stavros Lygeros, as a member of the Coordinating Committee in the Polytechnic uprising, provides his own political and personal testimony of those events.