The Greek Military Police, known by the acronym ESA, was founded in 1951 as Greece prepared to join NATO. For its first years it was an ordinary, if powerful, branch of the army. What set it apart was selection: officers and conscripts alike were chosen for an extreme, near-paranoid anti-communism, which gradually concentrated the most conservative and anti-democratic men of the officer corps in one institution. A posting to ESA was prized for the authority it carried. That same authority is what made it so dangerous when, in April 1967, a colonels' coup seized the Greek state and began ruling by martial law.

Under chief Dimitrios Ioannides, ESA swelled past 20,000 men and became the junta's chief instrument of repression. Thousands of political opponents were arrested and exiled to desolate Aegean prison islands. The worst of the abuse centered on the Special Interrogation Section - EAT-ESA - and the men held there were real people whose lives were permanently altered. Army Major Spyros Moustaklis, arrested for his part in a 1973 navy mutiny, endured forty-seven days of torture without betraying his colleagues; a blow to his neck left him brain-damaged and unable to speak for the rest of his life. Alexandros Panagoulis, who had tried to assassinate junta leader Georgios Papadopoulos in 1968, was beaten and tortured in these same cells. Witnesses later testified to the unit's chilling motto: those who entered left either as friends or as cripples.

Democracy returned in 1974, and Constantine Karamanlis disbanded ESA. The reckoning came quickly but imperfectly. The first torturers' trial opened at the Athens court-martial in August 1975, and its verdict was read that December: thirty-seven people were condemned, including three senior military-police officers sentenced to twenty-three, twenty, and twenty years. Yet most served only token terms. Torture had not been a defined crime in the Greek penal code at the time it was committed, so the torturers could be prosecuted only for grievous bodily harm. The survivors had to watch the law stretch to reach men who had spent years perfecting cruelty - and only partly succeed.

Today the building that held the interrogation sections houses the Eleftherios Venizelos Museum, and nearby stands the Museum of the Anti-Dictatorial and Democratic Resistance, where photographs, documents, and the personal belongings of the imprisoned and exiled are kept by the people who lived it. ESA itself was renamed simply Stratonomia, the Military Police, reformed into a conventional force staffed mostly by ordinary conscripts. The story is told here not as spectacle but as testimony. Walk the quiet paths of Eleftherias Park and the green of the trees does its gentle work - until you remember why the place is named for freedom, and at what cost the name was earned.