GREECE: Irene?

(2 of 2)

Eager Traveler. With returns incomplete, Plastiras' party was neck-and-neck with Dino Tsaldaris' Populists (Royalists). Sophocles Venizelos' Liberals were next. Sofianopoulos' Democratic Front, which got one-third of the vote in Athens, Piraeus and Salonika, was fourth, and the Social Democrats were fifth. The Social Democrats are resolute antiCommunists, but Sofianopoulos' group believes that it can do business with the Reds. As the returns came in he said cryptically: "My hobby is traveling," meaning that he would like to be Foreign Minister and try out some of his ideas for appeasing Russia.

Other Greeks had other ideas on this score, and thousands this week settled down to a favorite national pastime: scribbling possible cabinet lists on the backs of cigarette boxes. If the scribbling was productive, Greece might get what old Barba Katsikogianni longed for and what Greece herself had not known since 1940—Irene.