Home Is the Hunted

The British put a price of $28,000 on his head, and for four years up to 25,000 British troops combed the island of Cyprus searching for him. Everywhere they found traces of his handiwork--a defiant leaflet, a mine in the road, a body in the street. But nowhere did the British find Colonel George Grivas, hated and feared chief of the Greek Cypriot terrorist underground organization EOKA. Sometimes the British even wondered whether the legendary Grivas existed at all.

And now, after four years, there he was: an aging (60) little (5 ft. 3 in) grey-mustached man, gaunt, hollow-cheeked and weary, but very much alive. Last week, pardoned as part of the Cyprus peace settlement, George Grivas arrived home in Athens and was feted like a hero out of Homer. At the airport Grivas strode briskly down the gangway from the Greek Air Force Dakota that had been dispatched to Cyprus to fetch him, and he pushed first to the arms of his wife. He was dressed as he had lived for four hunted years, in brown sweater, brown britches, polished boots. His tan beret had the blue and white letters EOKA crudely embroidered on it. At his side hung a .45 revolver; across his chest were slung his binoculars. ("The incongruous clothing of some old-fashioned music hall turn," jeered London's Daily Express.)

Greek Against Goliath. "Your name is a Doric column in the pantheon of the great heroes of our glorious nation," said Archbishop Theoklitos, Greek Orthodox Primate of Greece, presenting Grivas with the ancient Greek symbol of victory, a silvered laurel wreath. Grivas was weeping. "Small Cyprus fought Goliath," he said. "It did not succumb." He had consented to a peace that brought self-government to Cyprus but forbade it enosis (union with Greece). He handed the mayor of Athens a small bag of earth taken from his mountain lair, and said emotionally, "This bit of soil, soaked with the blood of Cypriot fighters, will be the link between Cyprus and Greece." His eyes still wet, Grivas was led to a Cadillac, and driven through flag-decked streets to be cheered by a quarter million Athenians.

King Paul gave him the Medal of Bravery, and Parliament passed a law promoting Colonel Grivas to lieutenant general (only the King is a full general), awarded him full pay of $300 a month for life. Political parties besieged him to join them--but he put them off. First he had to rest, to have three teeth pulled and an injured finger treated.

Guerrilla Days. Everything was far different from when he had last seen Athens. A staff officer of the 2nd (Athens) Division when the Germans and Italians overran Greece in 1941, he had organized, after the fall of Greece, a right-wing group known simply as "X." Alongside the British, it fought first the Nazis, then the Communists in the Greek civil war of 1947-49. He had run for Parliament as an extreme right-wing candidate and lost. Then he began to think of doing something about the British rule on Cyprus, the island where he was born. For months he ate nothing but fruit, trained himself for what was to follow. On the afternoon of Oct. 6, 1954, he walked out of his Athens home, telling his wife Kiki: "Don't worry. I'll be back soon." But he also instructed her to burn his old clothes, so that no dog could pick up a scent from his clothing (the British once offered $1,400 for an old suit of Grivas').

It had been four "long and tough" years, Grivas told a TIME correspondent last week. "I am very tired." But he stood erect as he talked in his second-floor apartment at the foot of the Acropolis.

Statue to Harding. At first, while he trained his little guerrilla army, Grivas had to set detonation charges himself. Much of the time he hid in a tiny cave dug into the side of a hill, its mouth plugged with foliage and earth, a slender tube run inside for breathing.

"The Battle of the Marne was lost by panic," said Grivas. "What helped us was to keep calm." Once, hearing a British patrol, he dived behind a bush. Not two yards away a British tommy shouted, "Here! Here!" "Although I was getting ready to die with honor," said Grivas, "the tommy was only calling to his friends to move on." Another time, Grivas was bathing in a stream when British troops appeared near by. He hid naked behind tall reeds until the British moved on. "They came that close to us many times."

He lived mostly on fruit. "I thought a trail of orange peels would lead the British to me," he said with a smile. "Usually it was too dangerous to hunt. But once I was awakened by a goat prancing near me and could not resist. I have never tasted anything so good." Grivas kept constantly on the move--and eventually moved from the barren mountains into the towns. He spent the better part of the last two years shifting from house to house in Limassol (pop. 36,500), right under the noses of the British. A trusted deacon in the Limassol church passed notes for Grivas to black-veiled women at prayer, for relay to EOKA-men in the mountains.

His buried cache of arms, surrendered to the British last week along with grain sacks bursting with notched homemade grenades, was a sorry-looking collection, but Grivas said he could have gone on fighting "forever." "Some day," he said, "the Greek Cypriots should erect a statue to [British Field Marshal Sir John] Harding, for his cruelty and stubbornness helped me more than anything else. Sir Hugh Foot [the present Governor] was a different man. A diplomat."

"I was fanatically pro-British," Grivas had told a friend on leaving Cyprus. "But the British made us bitter. It is for them to rebuild this friendship now." And what now for him? "My dream is to return to Cyprus," said Grivas. On that unsettled island, its leader, bearded Archbishop Makarios, who had persuaded Grivas to lay down his arms, said cautiously: "After the Republic of Cyprus is formed, I see no objection." By that time next year, the British, whom Grivas had fought, would have only a base on Cyprus.

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