“In ’56 they split for the first time. I was a young man, I didn’t feel it. (...) My parents, my dad, he was really sad. He wasn’t in the party, Dad. He was left-oriented his whole life, but he wasn’t in the party. He said this is bad, this is bad, this is bad. (...) He was cheering for Zachariadis, because that was his thing. And then of course it came a second time, in ’68, in January, we had the twelfth plenary conference here - and a split. I was already in the party then, and of course we took it, I took it that at the time somewhere someone has to fall back on something. And I said: “Okay.” I had a brother-in-law, he’s deceased now, he was from the other side. But we didn’t quarrel. And they told him: “Tell Jura to come to our side,” esoteriko as they said in those days. (...) I said: “Christo, no. We’ll go there, okay, and where will our foundations be?” We saw the Soviet Union, saw that the strength lies with them. Even if they did things wrong, the strength was there, something to fall back on. That’s how I saw it at the time. Whether that was right or wrong, we all took it wrong. The one and the other side both did bad politics. No. And in the end the side I was on won, because slowly the people (...) came to us.”
Georgios Muratidis left Greece when he was twelve, and in 1948 he arrived in Romania: “In Romania they put us in the best hotels they had available. But we ruined them. I remember there were these small tiles that us children took apart to play with. And they let us.”
Upon leaving Greece, the twelve-year-old Georgios Muratidis came first to Albania: “We lived in houses in Dirrachia [Durrës], which is close to the sea. Every morning they ordered us ‘into the sea!’, where we washed. I saw the sea for the first time there. Just as I saw electric lights for the first time there, because in the mountains in Greece we didn’t have electricity yet. We were constantly amazed by it and we kept switching the lights on and off.”
“There was no big communist, thieves they were. I was in the party, I was party chairman in our local, Greek organisation. Thirty years in Zlaté Hory. I was twenty-five years old and I was party chairman already. Some of the oldies didn’t like that, but they couldn’t do anything. I did a good job, I was - I had to be - an example and so on, etcetera, yes. And to be in the party, in our party at the time, that was a sacrifice, nothing profitable. You put money into it, you didn’t have anything, no function anywhere. We held our meetings in the afternoon, when we had free time. So when they talk about it sometime, when we’re sitting in the pub, I say, yeah, I was in it, but I was giving, not taking.”
Georgios Muratidis was born in 1936 in northern Greece into a family of seven children. He came to Czechoslovakia, where his parents were already living in a Greek community, as a teenager from Romanian children‘s homes. Although he was educated in Romania, where he learned to be a lathe hand, in Czechoslovakia he became a foreman at the company Velamos. He was an active member of the Communist Party of Greece. He is currently chairman of the Greek community in Zlaté Hory.
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