On this day over eight decades ago, a Nazi infantry division retaliated and destroyed the Mega Spilaio Monastery, massacring monks and visitors alike. A few days later, the Massacre of Kalavryta, the worst atrocity committed during World War II in Greece by the occupying Nazis, occurred in the northern part of the Peloponnese.
In the morning hours of December 8, 1943, a group of German soldiers known as the 117th Jager Division, crossed the Vouraikos Gorge and headed towards the Mega Spilaio Monastery after having stopped at several villages in the area. At the monastery, they accused the monks of collaborating with British forces and supporting Greek Resistance members.
The monks denied the allegations, yet, by noon, the German soldiers had ordered all monks and visitors to gather at the monastery’s yard. They were then led to a location, known as Alonaki, a rock with a flat surface and a 100-meter cliff, less than a mile away.
With no survivors and no eye-witnesses, how the Nazis ended up killing the monks and the visitors remains unknown. However, what is known is that the Nazis then set the monastery on fire, destroying the remaining monastic cells that had been left untouched by a 1934 fire. The monastery was rebuilt from the ground up after the war.
The Kalavryta Massacre, the worst massacre committed in Greece by the Nazis
A day later, on December 9th, the Nazis entered Kalavryta. Many residents had already left the village in fear of retaliation, but the Germans called upon the Kalavrytians to return with the assurance that they would not be hurt. Instead, four days later, the Nazis executed more than 500 innocent civilians and burned the entire village of Kalavryta to the ground.
The Massacre of Kalavryta, also known as the Holocaust of Kalavryta, was also carried out by the German army’s 117th Jager Division. The extermination of the male population of Kalavryta was in retaliation for the execution of 68 German soldiers who had been captured by the Greek resistance.
“Operation Kalavryta,” or “Unternehmen Kalavryta,” was a typical German act of retaliation in areas where there was heavy guerrilla resistance. It was directed against the civilian population of the region and was one of the most barbaric carried out by the Wehrmacht—not only in Greece but in the entirety of Europe.
The massacre was memorialized in the 2014 book Hitler’s Orphan: Demetri of Kalavryta, by Marc Zirogiannis. This historical novella tells the story of the massacre from the perspective of the Zirogiannis family.
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