By late October 1944, the German army was gone from Greek Macedonia, and the war that had been hidden under the occupation came into the open. About ten thousand people — soldiers of the collaborationist Security Battalions, fighters from the right-wing EDES and EES, and the families that had cast their lot with them — had crowded into the small Macedonian town of Kilkis, north of Thessaloniki, hoping that walls and numbers would keep them safe. The communist-led ELAS partisans were already in the surrounding hills. On 4 November they came down.
Greece's resistance had never been a single thing. ELAS, the Greek People's Liberation Army, was led by the Greek Communist Party and had grown into the largest armed force in the country during the occupation. EDES, the National Republican Greek League, was smaller, royalist-leaning, and based mainly in Epirus. The Security Battalions had a different origin altogether: they had been raised by the German-installed Greek government in 1943 and 1944, partly to fight ELAS, partly to chase Bulgarian-occupied territory back from Bulgaria. SOE officer Chris Woodhouse, who knew the men involved, wrote later that some Greek nationalists 'regarded the Germans as a less serious enemy than the Bulgarians or the Communists'. It was a calculation that put them in uniforms many of their countrymen would not forgive.
When the Germans began withdrawing in October 1944, the calculation collapsed. The Caserta Agreement, signed in September between ELAS and the Greek government-in-exile, had declared all units associated with the Security Battalions enemy combatants and ordered them to surrender to the 11th Division of ELAS. Most of the Battalions and their supporters chose to gather in Kilkis instead. The town sat in farmland between Thessaloniki and the Bulgarian border, with low ridges on three sides — Ano Apostoloi, Mesoi Apostoloi, Kato Apostoloi — that the defenders fortified on 30 October. The local population was sympathetic to ELAS. Konstantinos Papadopoulos, one of the senior Security Battalion commanders, argued that the defences were poorly arranged. He took his unit of 1,500 men out of the town to the village of Mouries, promising to come back if needed. He did not.
The attack came on the morning of 4 November. ELAS pushed first for the tactically important hill of Agios Georgios above the town and took it. Then they fought house-to-house through Kilkis itself for nine hours. By evening the town had fallen. The defenders lost about 1,500 killed and 2,190 captured. ELAS reported between 118 and 180 of their own dead and several hundred wounded. A coalition of memory pulls hard at those numbers in different directions. Sources sympathetic to the nationalists put the total killed in action and executed afterwards as high as 7,432, a figure historians treat with caution. What is not in doubt is that after the surrender, scores of prisoners were shot in acts of revenge by individual ELAS members. Other captives were held in tobacco warehouses or marched south to a camp in Thessaloniki.
Kilkis was the bloodiest single clash between Greek communist and nationalist forces before the open civil war began. Two months later the British and ELAS would be shooting at each other in central Athens during the Dekemvriana, and within two years a full civil war would burn across the mountains of northern Greece. The Battle of Kilkis would be remembered as a moment when one Greek revenge fed the next. Both sides had legitimate claims to be liberating their country, and both had hands stained by the way they did it. Civilians in the town had taken in soldiers they did not invite, and other civilians had cheered when the soldiers were shot.
In November 1967, six months after the colonels' coup, the junta's interior minister Stylianos Pattakos and minister for northern Greece Dimitrios Patilis held the first official memorial service for the Kilkis defenders. A year later the regime put up a monument to victims of what it called Slavo-Communism. Until the regime fell in 1974, the state held annual commemorations there. After democracy returned, the city council built a second memorial next to the town hall in 1992 to fighters from all the resistance organisations of Kilkis. In 2002, private supporters of the communist-led resistance erected a third statue, to the partisans. Three memorials, one battle. Different families lay flowers at different stones on different days. The argument the battle started has not entirely ended.
40.98°N, 22.87°E, in central Greek Macedonia about 45 km north of Thessaloniki and 25 km south of the North Macedonia and Bulgaria borders. The town sits on a low plain with the Krousia mountains to the east and the Paikon range to the west. Nearest airport is Thessaloniki (LGTS), just 50 km south. The terrain is open and the field road network typical of late-war partisan country: easy to read from altitude, especially in clear autumn light when the harvested fields show the contour.