A half century after the coup d’état of 21 April 1967, the art exhibition documenta 14 launched its public programs in Athens by revisiting the Colonels’ dictatorship. The organizers chose the former headquarters of the infamous military police (EAT/ESA) to host the “exercises of freedom,” 1 a series of walking tours, lectures, screenings, and performances that examined resistance, torture, trauma, and displacement in a comparative perspective. The initiative was met with mixed feelings, and its public discussion raised important questions about the past. Why is it urgent today to revisit the junta as a period of acute trauma? Can we trace the roots of Greece’s current predicament to its non-democratic past? What remains unsaid and unsayable about the dictatorship and its enduring legacies? 2 While the junta has been a favorite subject for public history (broadly understood here to include literature, film, personal testimonies, and so on), research on it has remained on the margins. Initially, it was marked by sporadic attempts to respond to the pressing public interest to understand the dictatorship as a contemporary phenomenon (Tsoucalas 1969; Clogg and Yannopoulos 1972; Poulantzas 1976; Mouzelis 1978) and, most importantly, to explain how the Colonels came to power and why they managed to govern Greece for seven years. Subsequently, while historians of Greece started focusing on World War II, the Axis Occupation, and the Greek Civil War, literature on the junta remained fragmented and introspective, never coalescing into a coherent body of work capable of building on collective insights and speaking to broader scholarly debates. Unlike the books of the previous decade, the few scholarly works of the 1980s and 1990s (for example, Alivizatos 1983; Diamandouros 1983; Charalambis 1985; Woodhouse 1985; Bermeo 1995; Meletopoulos 1996; Dafermos 1999; Regos, Athanasatou, and Sepheriades 1999) largely assumed a Greek audience that was both interested in macrohistorical narratives and indifferent to the possibility that the Greek 1960s and 1970s might constitute a