March 26, 1957
KARAMANLIS’S MESSAGE: To mark the celebration of Independence Day (March 25), Prime Minister Constantine Karamanlis issued the following message to his fellow Greeks: «This anniversary brings us back in spirit to one of the greatest moments of our age-old history. The nation… is now trying to rise from the ashes and be once more a free society, civilized and creative within the embrace of free nations. It has entered that struggle almost without any resources, but draws its strength from its awareness of its great historic continuity and its great historic mission… For seven years, struggling against superior material forces, against wrongdoing on the part of enemies and friends… (our forebears) won a harsh victory and freed a small, poor corner of Greek earth. Since then, with continuing struggles, Greeks have managed to free those territories that history and the will of their inhabitants had made their own… Now that a part of the nation, the Cypriot people, is fighting for its freedom, all of us Greeks must be baptized again in the climate of the liberation struggle of 1821…»
