A Bacteriologist Against Fascism: Amalia Fleming and the Struggle for a Free Greece.

On August 29, 1971, a 59 year old Greek woman who was beloved throughout Athens for the lengths she had gone to during World War II to aid the Resistance against the Nazis and protect Jews, foreign officers, and conscientious objectors from prison and execution, was arrested by her own country’s government and accused of treason against the state. It was not her first time being arrested - the Nazis had kept her in prison for six months in 1944 with the constant threat of execution or torture hovering above her head - but it was to be the most disspiriting period of her life, as she observed at first hand the degradation of her own nation at the hands of those who had been entrusted to protect it. 

Her name was Amalia Fleming (1912 - 1986) and for thirty-one days, she was interrogated at EAT ESA, the headquarters of the Greek military police’s Special Interrogation Center, as run by the infamous Major Theodoros Theophyloyannakos. What followed was a showdown between integrity and sadism as Theophyloyannakos applied every means he could, shy of direct torture, to break Fleming’s will and make her betray her friends, while Fleming stayed resolutely true to her principles, her country, and the people in her life whom she loved.

The steadfastness of her loyalty is perhaps traceable to a life always spent slightly on the outside, looking in on worlds in which one doesn’t entirely belong, grateful for every connection formed, and consequently more defensive of, and steadfast towards, the objects of those connections. Amalia Koutsouri was born in 1909 or 1912 in Constantinople to a Greek dermatologist of solidly middle class status, but in 1914 the family had to flee the country in the wake of the ever more Turk-centered ethnic policy of the Ottoman Empire. Returning to Greece, she followed her father into medicine in spite of her own early predilection for philosophy, graduating from the University of Athens in 1938 as a bacteriology specialist. 

In 1941, the Axis powers invaded Greece, and Amalia and her husband joined the Resistance, helping to procure fake identification for Allied soldiers, Greek resistance fighters, and Jews being persecuted by the occupiers, moving resistance radio equipment around from location to location in potato sacks to keep them out of Axis hands, and hiding refugees in the house she had inherited from her aunt. Her name was soon tortured out of one of her colleagues in the resistance, and in November 1941 she started her six month term in Averoff Prison, with the constant threat of execution if she did not provide information about her associates. 

She refused to give up her knowledge about the resistance, and through some miracle, perhaps because of her relatively high position in society, she escaped being tortured by the occupiers to compel her to talk. By war’s end, her marriage was effectively over, and her years of devoting all her time and resources to the Resistance cause meant the knowledge she had learned for her degree was outdated, affecting her ability to resume normal life as a bacteriologist unless she brushed up her education. This she did, winning a scholarship to study in London, where beginning in 1946 she took up work at St. Mary’s Hospital’s Inoculation Department while researching in the laboratory of Alexander Fleming (1881-1955), who was at the time a world scientific celebrity on account of his 1928 discovery of penicillin, which gave the world its first broadly effective and mass produceable antibiotic. 

In 1947, thanks to funding provided to Fleming by the American philanthropist Ben May, Amalia was able to purchase a phase-contrast microscope for her research. This type of microscope was invented in the early 1930s by Frits Zernike using optical elements produced by the factory of Dr. Caroline Bleeker, and was such a game changer in optical research that Zernike was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1953 for its development. Amalia used the phase-contrast microscope in her studies on bacterial resistance to antibiotics which resulted in the publication of some nine academic articles over the space of five years, including a report on best practices for preparing bacteria to harness phase-contrast technology, and studies on how resistance to antibiotics can be gained, lost, and regained based on what chemicals or environmental conditions the bacteria are exposed to and what other bacteria they are mixed with. Her later research, on S. aureus, extended these studies to see how traits caused by chemical agents were or were not transmitted across generations, providing evidence for which agents worked through genetically altering their target bacteria, preventing them from producing key proteins.

Alexander and Amalia

In 1951, Amalia returned to Greece, where she became head of the bacteriology department at Evangelismos Hospital, and used her fluency with language to become Alexander Fleming’s interpreter and guide during his European lecture tours. Fleming’s wife had died in 1949 and he found himself falling in love with Amalia, proposing to her in November of 1952. She accepted in spite of a 31 year age gap, and the pair were married on April 9, 1953. Because of Alexander’s constant travels outside the country for lecturing, re-entry into England for Amalia was a consistent difficulty requiring interminable refreshing of visas, so she decided to obtain dual citizenship in England and Greece, a status which would prove a double-edged sword to her in years to come.

Alexander died of a heart attack on March 11, 1955, and for the next two years Amalia, like many of the figures we have studied in this series who were married to famous scientist husbands, gave up her own research in order to organize Alexander’s papers and arrange for a scientific monograph of his life and work to be published. After this, she began the long process of relocating to Greece, spending more months each year in Athens and fewer in London until, by 1967, she became a permanent resident once again of her home country.

Fatefully, just over a month after having permanently resettled herself in Athens, the country fell into the clutches of the Regime of the Colonels, a military dictatorship ushered in by a coup, and kept in power until 1974 through the ruthlessness of its secret police force. Amalia, as heedless for her own safety as she had been in 1941, devoted herself to providing resources to the families of those who were targeted by the regime. This was enough to bring her to the attention of the authorities, but they largely let her continue her personal acts of aid to the persecuted until she involved herself in the plans to free Alexandros Panagoulis from the prison where he was being held for his 1968 attempt to assassinate junta head Georgios Papadopoulos. Word had reached her that he was being regularly and brutally tortured by his jailers, and so she formed a plan with friends of his to break him free from prison in late August of 1971. 

That attempt failed, and Amalia was arrested for her suspected role in the plot. Once again, her status, both in society (she had been awarded the Order of Beneficence in 1965), and as a holder of British citizenship, kept her from the more overt torture applied to her co-conspirators, but she could hear their screams of agony from her own holding cell, and was regularly denied water, privacy, sleep, and sanitation in the month-long attempt to get her to reveal details about resistance to the regime. Her chief interrogator was the feared Theodoros Theophyloyannakos, who was known throughout the capitol for the ferocity of his technique, which included inserting wire into the urethra of his victims and then heating it with flames while inserted. Genital brutality, foot lashing, and repeatedly bashing victims’ heads against the concrete floor were part of his regular toolkit, but with Amalia he had to change tactics, alternating between honeyed attempts to lure her to the government’s side, including offers of ministerial positions, and day-long rants that if she did not comply, everybody she knew who was in his custody would be rounded up and tortured in front of her. 

Guards would bang on her doors at regular intervals to keep her from sleeping, she was denied regular access to the lavatory, lights were kept on at all times, and her access to water was regulated and restricted in spite of her diabetic status. She was regularly fed false tales about friends who had informed on her, and of stories in the newspapers which painted her as a traitor to the nation. She lost weight, and her health suffered until she was urinating almost pure blood on the eve of her public trial. Finally, after thirty-one days of threat and interrogation, she had her trial, and was sentenced to prison for sixteen months in Korydallos Prison. 

Here, though she requested to be jailed with the political prisoners, she was instead placed with the regular criminals, so that her wing mates included a number of murderers in the mix. Still, compared to her time under the eye of Theophyloyannakos, Korydallos represented something of an idyll. She could turn her light on and off at will. Her toilet was functioning and carried sewage away instead of letting it sit and fester. She was no longer being regularly questioned or psychologically tormented. And her fellow prisoners soon formed a close community who looked to her for guidance. Her time at Korydallos, however, was to prove limited, as her doctors and lawyer convinced the government that her health was in a perilous enough state to warrant allowing her to return home, recover, and serve the rest of her sentence later.

Amalia’s return home was greeted with joy throughout Athens, and a picture of her reunion with her beloved but affronted cat made the international rounds. Back at home, she soon suffered an attack of angina and was no sooner ordered to remain in bed and rest than officials from the government entered her house and told her that they were taking her away for questioning, then instead drove her to the airport, where she was physically forced to board a plane for London. She told the authorities who had made the decision to deport her that they were making a terrible decision, that in Greece she would have to stay quiet about all she knew and thought of the regime, but that if deported to England, she would never stop trying to bring the plight of Greece to the attention of the Western powers which had, so far, turned a blind eye to the military junta because it was politically expedient to do so.

Amalia returns home to her beloved cat, who is having none of it.

The government didn’t listen, and Amalia Fleming was duly deported, and from the moment she hit the ground in London, she began her campaign to educate the public about the horrors being perpetrated in Greece under the name of public order and lawfulness, including her own memoir about her time in prison, A Piece of Truth, published in 1973. The following year the junta fell after the Turkish invasion of Cyprus caused a definitive break between different factions of the junta, leading to the restoration of parliamentary democracy. Fleming returned to Greece shortly thereafter, and was elected three times to the Greek Parliament - in 1977, 1981, and 1985, and though she was no longer actively engaging in research, she was a driving force behind the creation of the Athens Biomedical Sciences Research Centre Alexander Fleming, which ultimately saw the light of day in 1997, just over a decade after her death.

Amalia Fleming died on February 26, 1986. Had she just been the bacteriologist who employed new optical technologies to probe the world of bacterial resistance to antibiotics, and who ensured the collection and preservation of the work of Alexander Fleming, she would more than have deserved her spot in our memories, but that she was on top of all of that, a fierce defender of freedom against tyranny and fascism, who put her beliefs into practice at the cost of her own health and psychological well-being, makes her an example of intellectual and political bravery whose story we not only should be telling, but must be telling, if for no other reason than to remind ourselves of what one person of principle can do when faced with a towering, brutal, but fundamentally weak government attempting to seize a nation away from its people. 

FURTHER READING:

 Fleming’s story is one of many contained in Whitaker and Barton’s invaluable Women In Microbiology (2018), but if you want the full story of what she experienced during the dark years of the Regime of the Colonels, you should really flag down a copy of A Piece of Truth. It is an important and eloquent eye-witness account of the worst abuses of that era, and an inspiring story of how steadfastness before tyranny can operate, with her accounts of her verbal jousts with Theophyloyannakos in particular demonstrating how the techniques of fascism fall apart when faced with determined resistance.