Constantine Karamanlis, the tall and strikingly handsome elder statesman of Greece, died yesterday aged 91. He suffered a heart attack in an Athens hospital where he had been treated for a respiratory infection for the past fortnight.
The Greek government immediately announced three days of national mourning. A private family funeral will be held today.
The sobriquet which his countrymen bestowed upon him said everything about the esteem with which they had come to hold him. They called him, simply, God.
Not that Karamanlis ever claimed such a title for himself. He was a modest if occasionally abrasive man but, as the Prime Minister, Mr Costas Simitis, noted in a tribute, he "set an indelible seal on Greece during the last half century [and] played a primary role in the peaceful transition from dictatorship to democracy".
In fact, there can be little doubt but that Karamanlis is the greatest political figure in post-war Greece. It was he who restored order, sanity and, ultimately, national self-respect after the grotesque dictatorship of army colonels collapsed in 1974.
And in those fraught years as Greece sought to climb out of the fascist darkness into which the colonels' plunged the country for seven years, Karamanlis was also sufficiently shrewd to keep at arm's length the divisive, not-too-bright but irritatingly persistent ex-King Constantine - the man who, still to this day, would be king.
Karamanlis, who was born in 1907 in Proti, a Greek village in northern Macedonia, which was still under Ottoman Turk domination, trained as a lawyer but entered politics in 1928. During the Nazi occupation of Greece, he joined Greek exile Allied forces stationed in Egypt. After the war, he was appointed labour minister in 1947.
Always on the centre right of the political spectrum, Karamanlis was never an extremist. During the 1967-1974 dictatorship, he lived in Paris. And it was to him that ordinary Greeks turned for leadership when the colonels collapsed rather than to the more demagogic socialist, Andreas Papandreou.
The tenor of his post-dictatorship years in office were in stark contrast to the brash and ultimately corrupt rule of Mr Papandreou.
In retirement, the patrician Karamanlis led a very quiet life in an up-market Athens suburb, avoiding utterly any involvement in politcis. As Greeks rushed yesterday to heap praise upon him, they might recall that in a moment of rare exasperation, he once referred to the country as "one huge lunatic asylum".
