Culture Club

MP and Greek anti-fascist resistance icon Grigoris Lambrakis marching alone in the banned Marathon–Athens Peace Rally on Sunday April 21 1963, one month before his assassination

Christos Sartzetakis (Greek: Χρήστος Σαρτζετάκης; born 6 April 1929) is a Greek jurist and former supreme justice of the Court of Cassation, who served as the President of the Third Hellenic Republic from 1985 to 1990. He was born in Neapoli, Thessaloniki in 1929.

He was the unyielding prosecutor in the sensational case of the assassination of the left-wing member of Parliament (and ‘doctor of the poor’) Grigoris Lambrakis, committed on 22 May 1963 in Thessaloniki by right-wing extremists. Lambrakis had called for Greece to disarm and withdraw from NATO. Over half a million people attended his funeral. Despite obstruction of justice by his superiors, Sartzetakis doggedly pursued his investigation to the end. He succeeded in convicting the police officers involved in the murder; they were later rehabilitated by the Greek military junta of 1967-1974.

The circumstances of the Lambrakis investigation was the theme of the well-known 1966 novel Z by Vassilis Vassilikos and portrayed by Jean-Louis Trintignant in the novel's 1969 film adaptation by Costas Gavras.

After the Lambrakis prosecution, Sartzetakis left for Paris on a state-sponsored educational leave to study comparative law at the Faculté de Droit et des Sciences Économiques de Paris and the Centre Universitaire des Études des Communautés Européennes. Immediately following the coup d'état of 21 April 1967 by George Papadopoulos, he was called back to Athens by the military junta. Along with 29 other magistrates, he was discharged by a "Constitutional Act" from all his legal functions on 29 May 1968. He was twice arrested, and imprisoned for almost a year until he was released on 19 November 1971 under mounting international pressure. During his captivity, he was tortured by the Greek Military Police.

Trintignant as:

four aspects (62)