OXI DAY: The Day of NO!
VICTORIA M. LORD
A
t 3 a.m. on the morning of October 28, 1940, Emanuele Grazzi, the Italian ambassador to Greece, delivered an ultimatum from Benito Mussolini to Prime Minister Ioannis Metaxas. Il Duce demanded that Metaxas
allow the Italian army free passage to enter and occupy
strategic sites in Greece unopposed.
Faced with this demand, Metaxas delivered an unequivocal response in French, the diplomatic language of
the day, “Alors, c’est la guerre.” This brief phrase, “Then,
it is war,” was quickly transmuted into the laconic “Oxi,”
the Greek for no, by the citizens of Athens.
At 5:30 a.m., before the ultimatum had even expired,
the Italian army poured over the Greek-Albanian border
into the mountainous Pindos region of Northern Greece.
There they met fierce and unexpected resistance.
Within six months, Ioa