70,000 armed, 5,000 dead, 25,000 displaced, in just one month, is the brief assessment of the fiercest battle ever fought in Athens.

The December events were the only case during World War II where allied forces clashed armed, and moreover in the capital of a country that had just been liberated from Nazi occupation. In the dense time of 33 days, contradictions, divisions, and expectations emerged, rooted in the recent past. In the battles on the streets of Athens, we can discern traces of the National Division and the Asia Minor Catastrophe, of political instability and the economic crisis of the Interwar period, the consequences of Ioannis Metaxas' dictatorship, and of course the unprecedented changes brought about in Greek society by the experience of Occupation and Resistance during the war. At the same time, the Battle of Athens solidified Greece's position in the international power relations of post-war Europe, determined the developments that led to the civil war, and shaped the political and social reality of the country, at least until the fall of the Junta in 1974.

Despite their pivotal position in modern Greek history and the decades that have passed, the December events constitute one of the least studied fields of Greek historiography, and the questions are far more numerous than the answers we have. Some of these questions are answered by the texts in this volume: the process of transforming Athens into a battlefield, the international dimensions of the December events, the ways in which political contradictions that had been exacerbated during the Occupation were manifested, the fate of civilians trapped in war-torn Athens, the conditions prevailing in other cities, the formation of memory and narrative about the December events, largely still determine today the discourse surrounding the bloody conflict of 1944.