Ioannis Mazarakis-Ainian


Ioannis Mazarakis-Ainian was a Greek army officer, politician, and historian.

Life

Ioannis Mazarakis-Ainian was born in Athens in 1923, the son of Konstantinos Mazarakis-Ainian, a general and guerrilla leader in the Macedonian Struggle.
During the Axis occupation of Greece, he joined the Allied naval intelligence network, before fleeing Greece and joining the Greek Mountain Brigade as a volunteer. After the liberation of Greece in 1944, he entered the Hellenic Military Academy, graduating in 1947 and immediately joined the newly formed Mountain Raiding Companies, fighting in the ongoing Greek Civil War. For his military service, he received Greece's highest decoration for gallantry, the Cross of Valour in Gold, seven times, the Greek War Cross four times, and the Distinguished Acts Medal twice, making him one of the most highly decorated officers in Greek history.
He left the army soon after the end of the Civil War, and served as prefect of the Kastoria Prefecture from 1962 until April 1967, when he resigned. In 1977–1979, in the lead-up to Greece's accession to the European Economic Community, he was head of the Greek press office in Brussels. After 1979, he served as secretary-general of the Historical and Ethnological Society of Greece, which supervises the National Historical Museum in Athens, a post he held for over forty years.
His son, Konstantinos Mazarakis-Ainian, became an admiral and chief of the Greek navy's Fleet Command.

Works