OUR first day of May identified with the struggle for labor rights. The identification is not unfair, but it is not bloodless either: a general strike called on May 1, 1886 by workers in Chicago, then the heart of industrial America, claimed the lives of at least 16 demonstrators and 7 policemen. In the arrests and trials that followed, four workers were sentenced to death and one committed suicide in prison.

Workers’ May Day was established as the day of the general strike three years later, in 1889. The “holiday” is replenished with new demands and new claims, not missing those moments when the blood cycle opens again.

May Day in Greece was stained with blood in 1924 when worker Socratis Paraskevaidis died and 17 people were injured in clashes at a rally organized by the Athens Labor Center at the Municipal Theater Square (today Kotsia Square) under martial law. Equally bloody was May Day 1936 in Thessaloniki, when 12 people died in a large tobacco demonstration.

Among the victims was Thassos Tusis. The cry of his mother over his body inspired the creation of the “Epitaph” by Yannis Ritsos, who, it is worth noting, was born on May 1, 1909.

However, the political nature of May 1 is not only about labor demands.

Mass execution in Kaysariani

It was a May day in 1944 when the Nazi occupiers executed 200 Greek political prisoners at the Kesariani shooting range in retaliation for the killing of a German major general by ELAS fighters in Molaus, Laconia.

The execution order was published in the press on April 30, 1944. “On April 27, 1944, communist gangs, despite Molaus Laconia, after an ambush attack, bravely killed a German general and three of his associates. Many German soldiers were wounded. In response, it was ordered: 1. To shoot 200 communists from a rifle on May 1, 1944, ”the order said, in particular.

Death of Alekos Panagoulis

The early morning of May 1, 1976, when the car of Alekos Panagoulis, leader of the junta resistance, veers off course and enters a shop. The seriously wounded Alekos Panagoulis will take his last breath in a few hours, two months before his 37th birthday.

His death shocks all of Greece, leaving room for the hypothesis that it was not an accident, but a murder behind which were nostalgic for the dictatorship or persons connected in one way or another with the regime. Moreover, his death came a few days after Panagoulis, as a member of the Centrist Union, stated that he had information from the ESA files that revealed the identities of the junta’s collaborators.

Manifesto against fascism

On May 1, 1925, the “Manifesto of Anti-Fascist Intellectuals” was published in the Italian newspapers Il Mondo and Il Popolo. Its editor was the famous philosopher, literary critic and politician Benedetto Croce.

Labor Day was not chosen by chance. The so-called “anti-manifesto” was a response to the “Manifesto of Fascist Intellectuals” published on Christmas Day 1924.

Proclamation of Cuba as a “socialist state”.

On May 1, 1961, in a speech of about 10,000 words, Fidel Castro declares Cuba a “socialist state”, and with it the suspension of elections. “Do the people now have time for elections? No! What are political parties? Only an expression of class conflict. But there is only one class here (…) The revolution cannot waste time in such madness,” he proclaims among other things.

Cuba’s longest-serving leader came to power two years earlier, handing power over temporarily to his brother in 2006 and finally in 2008.

“Mission Accomplished” in Iraq

On May 1, 2003, then US President George W. Bush appeared on the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln to announce that “the main fighting in Iraq is over.”

The American invasion of Iraq began six weeks earlier. In the same speech that became known as “Mission Accomplished,” Bush nonetheless declared that “there is still much to be done in Iraq.”

The withdrawal of US troops from the Arab country was not issued until August 2021 by US President Joe Biden and Iraqi Prime Minister Kadimi.

EU enlargement

On May 1, 2004, nine countries, including Cyprus, became members of the European Union. The rest are Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Slovenia and Hungary.

^{Source: APE-MEB}