10 Lepta Regime of the Colonels

The 1973 Greek coinage series belongs to the final year of the military junta that had seized power in April 1967. By the time these were struck, the regime was collapsing internally — the November 1973 Athens Polytechnic uprising had been crushed by tanks, Papadopoulos was ousted in a counter-coup by Ioannidis in November, and civilian government was restored the following summer. Coins dated 1973 thus straddle a constitutional fiction: Greece had nominally abolished the monarchy in June of that year following a heavily manipulated referendum.