The Greek junta or Regime of the Colonels was a right-wing military dictatorship that ruled Greece from 1967 to 1974. On 21 April 1967, a group of colonels overthrew the caretaker government a month before scheduled elections which Georgios Papandreou's Centre Union was favoured to win. The dictatorship was characterised by right-wing cultural policies, anti-communism, restrictions on civil liberties, and the imprisonment, torture, and exile of political opponents. It was ruled by Georgios Papadopoulos from 1967 to 1973, but an attempt to renew its support in a 1973 referendum on the monarchy and gradual democratisation was ended by another coup by the hardliner Dimitrios Ioannidis, who ruled it until it fell on 24 July 1974 under the pressure of the Turkish invasion of Cyprus, leading to the Metapolitefsi ("regime change") to democracy and the establishment of the Third Hellenic Republic.

Kostas Georgakis (Greek: Κώστας Γεωργάκης) (23 August 1948 – 19 September 1970) was a Greek student of geology, who in the early hours of 19 September 1970, set himself ablaze in Matteotti square in Genoa in a fatal protest against the dictatorial regime of Georgios Papadopoulos.