Death Leap

It is 1941. The Nazis have seized control of Greece, and the symbols of Greek statehood are being stripped from the great monuments and public buildings of the land. On the 27th of April, a detachment of German troops is despatched to the Acropolis to remove the Greek flag and replace it with the swastika of the occupiers. They find it guarded by an evzone (the kilted ceremonial soldiers of the Greek Army, whom you may have seen in Syntagma Square guarding the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier). (1)

The evzones strut their funky stuff in winter uniform.

Guarding the flag at the Acropolis is Konstantinos Koukidis, and the Germans order him to take down the flag and hand it over. The evzone pulls the flag down as instructed, but rather than meekly surrender himself and the national symbol to the Germans, he wraps himself in it and leaps from the Acropolis to die on the rocks below. Monuments both at the base of the Acropolis and at the evzones barracks commemorate his sacrifice:

The Koukidis monument below the Parthenon.

A month later, on May 30 (hey, nearly an anniversary-related article here!) two young leftists, Manolis Glezos and Apostolos Santas, secretly climbed the Acropolis and tore down the Nazi flag. Glezos, despite being sentenced to death in absentia for this act, survived three separate spells of imprisonment and torture by (at various times) German, Italian and Greek collaborationist forces and is still hale enough at 88 to get himself tear-gassed during an anti-austerity demonstration earlier this year...

Manolis Glezos in 2007. Still Red after all these years.

All very inspiring, I'm sure, but there is a slight problem - one of these things probably never happened.  Koukidis appears never to have existed: there is no record of him in Army documents, there are no known witnesses to his act of patriotic self-sacrifice. Indeed, there is said to be film of the Germans lowering the flag themselves (2).

 This, however, is clearly them raising their own flag.

Koukidis, whose story is not attested till after the other incident, appears to be a phantom, invented to give a right-wing counterbalance to the widely reported defiance of the young Communists Glezos and Santas.

So it should come as no surprise that the Daily Mail reproduced it at the time (9 June):

At the top of the page, it is. From fotios.org.

What the probably fictional Koukidis incident does resemble, however, is the story of the Los Ninos Heroes, the "Boy Heroes", teenage Mexican military cadets who fought to the death against invading US forces in Mexico City during September 1847. As defenders of Chapultepec Castle -  then in use as a military academy - six of the youths supposedly refused to withdraw with their commander and other students, or to surrender. As the Americans stormed the castle, artillery cadet officer Juan Escutia is said to have wrapped himself in the Mexican standard and leapt to his death.

 The memorial to the Boy Heroes. Not one of Mexico's architectural gems.

There appears to be at least some truth in this story - the six cadets' graves have been identified at the castle and their remains reinterred in a dedicated monument - though one suspects the account of Escutia's heroic death plunge may contain a certain amount of embroidery for patriotic effect. President Truman gave it credence though in 1947 when, during a visit to Mexico a few months prior to the centenary of the battle, he laid a wreath at the site.

The similarity between the stories provokes the suspicion that one may have been the inspiration for the other...

Notes
(1) Evzones, like any ceremonial public guards who wear silly uniforms (cf. Buckingham Palace), have to put up with a barrel-load of crap from dimwitted tourists, and have developed a strict regime of silence and stoic disregard for external distractions. During a 2001 demonstration, the wooden guardhouse by the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier was hit by a petrol bomb and caught fire. The evzone next to it didn't move a muscle till instructed by an officer, even though his uniform was already starting to smoulder. In 2010, the officer and two soldiers on duty refused to leave their posts even after a bomb warning (which was genuine, but fortunately the device harmed no-one). If hassled by idiot tourists, they generally respond by carrying out a form of salute which involves banging the butt of their WW2-vintage M1 Garand rifles - unloaded, but with bayonets fixed - on the ground. This usually has the desired effect.
(2) This could of course mean nothing - pictures of famous flag-related incidents are not always quite what they seem.

EDIT: Music link removed 2/1/2013