By decision of Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis, there will be no student and military parades on October 28 to celebrate Oxi Day, as announced by government spokesman Stelios Petsas.
It is recalled that March 25 Independence Day celebrations were also cancelled, when the country was in lockdown.
Oxi Day, or "No Day," is celebrated all over the world wherever Greeks are in commemoration of Greek Prime Minister Ioannis Metaxas rejecting the ultimatum from Italian dictator Benito Mussolini to allow Italy to occupy Greece.
Metaxas gave a firm negative response, sparking the Greco-Italian War on October 28, 1940, which ended in utter catastrophic failure for the Italian invaders, and received praise all over the world, including from British Prime Minister Winston Churchill who famously said "We shall not say that Greeks fight like heroes, but heroes fight like Greeks."
Elsewhere, Petsas said after receiving a question from a journalist that the measure for compulsory mask use outdoors is not being considered for change at the moment.
As the government spokesman said, "the picture we have is a stabilization and not an exponential increase in cases, as was initially estimated."
Petsas also presented data that show that Greece is still doing better than countries with similar populations such as Belgium, the Netherlands, Portugal - both in terms of the number of victims and the number of cases.
Petsas also spoke about Microsoft's investment in Greece, amounting to one billion euros, in his briefing to journalists.
As Petsas said, "the added value of Microsoft's investment is expected to reach 1 billion euros. This is an investment that is a vote of confidence in Greece. This investment concerns the installation in our country of an important part of new technological infrastructure of the company that is related, among other things, to the activities of cloud services."
At this point he referred to what the Prime Minister had previously stressed that "in just nine months and despite the clouds of the pandemic, we arrived here: the birth of a significant, innovative investment with multilevel economic importance and great social return."
