Stylianos Pattakos, Greek junta member, 1912-2016

In the early hours of Friday April 21 1967, a 40-strong fleet of US-made M47 tanks trundled ominously through Athens, taking up positions outside strategic buildings and at junctions. In command was Stylianos Pattakos, one of the three officers who staged what became known as the “colonels’ coup”.

Within 24 hours, martial law was in force, political leaders and hundreds of alleged leftwing sympathisers were under arrest and a youthful King Constantine had reluctantly recognised the regime. Nato allies followed suit. Yet few Greeks thought the army would hold sway for seven years, longer than any democratic government in memory.

While Pattakos could boast that power had changed hands without a shot fired, several thousand opponents of the regime, among them politicians, intellectuals and members of the judiciary, were imprisoned or exiled to remote Aegean Islands. Hundreds were tortured by the military police.

Pattakos, who has died aged 103, was the junta’s last survivor. An ebullient personality and an enthusiasm for promoting “the revolution”, the military’s term for the coup, had made him the frequent face of the junta. As interior minister he also oversaw a swath of construction projects — roads, dams and electrification — that made the regime popular in the provinces.

Dismissed as a buffoon by the Athenian elite, Pattakos was nicknamed “Top Trowel” for his habit of laying cement at the inauguration of each facility. Such events were faithfully recorded in the junta’s propaganda films, screened regularly at cinemas.

When convicted of treason in 1975, the brigadier was sentenced to death alongside co-conspirator colonels George Papadopoulos, who had made himself prime minister, and Nikolaos Makarezos, in charge of the economy. But the sentences were commuted to life by Constantine Karamanlis, the conservative leader who restored democracy.

After his release in 1990 on grounds of ill health, Pattakos told an interviewer: “I knew poverty: my mother and sisters carried water every day from the one tap in our village. As minister, I said I’d put water, lights, telephones everywhere — and we did.”

For all the political and economic upheavals endured in recent years by democracy’s founding nation, popular desire for a return to rule by the gun remains low. Yet some fret that an array of competing interests stalls progress. “Every minority wants to hold the majority to ransom. It can be students, transport workers or judges,” says Thanos Veremis, emeritus professor of history at Athens University.

The son of a farmer, Pattakos was born in Crete on November 8 1912. He claimed to be descended from the Skor­dilis, a noble Byzantine family.

A professional soldier who served in armoured units in both the second world war and Greece’s 1946-49 civil war between nationalists and communists, he shared his colleagues’ anti-communism and contempt for parliamentary democracy. But as a senior officer at an armoured division training unit, he was less of a misfit than Papadopoulos or Makarezos, who had been resentful about losing promotions to those with better political connections.

He was promoted to deputy prime minister, only to be sidelined when, under US pressure, Papadopoulos appointed a civilian to lead Greece to elections. But after the violent crushing of a 1973 student rebellion, Papadopoulos was overthrown by Dimitrios Ioannidis, chief of the military police. The new dictatorship fomented a coup in Cyprus, which prompted a Turkish military intervention on the island. Unprepared to fight a war, Ioannidis opened the way for democracy to be restored.

Pattakos spent his years in prison writing his version of events. His 11 books helped support him financially after his army pension was revoked. In recent years he lived quietly in a small apartment in central Athens with his wife Dimitra, who died in 2013. He is survived by two daughters.

A life-long apologist for the junta, he believed the coup saved Greece from a communist takeover. He refused to acknowledge that opponents suffered torture — with the exception of Alexandros Panagoulis, a leftwing poet who failed in an attempt to assassinate Papadopoulos. “Panagoulis deserved everything that happened to him,” he said.

Though Prof Veremis laments a lack of checks and balances as bringing “too much tolerance now in political life”, a democratic system that can trace its origins back 2,500 years was undoubtedly strengthened by Greece’s last encounter with uniformed dictators.

Kerin Hope