Andreas Tsipas

Who was Andreas Tsipas?

Andreas Tsipas was a Greek Communist leader during the Second World War and the Greek Civil War.

In 1933, he became a leader of the IMRO in Greek Macedonia and member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Greece. He was a KKE candidate in the last pre-war Greek legislative elections in 1936. Between 1936 and 1941, he was imprisoned in the Acronauplia prison by political reasons. On 30 June 1941, Tzipas was one of 27 communist prisoners released from the Acronauplia at the request of the Bulgarian embassy in Athens with the intercession of Bulgarian Club in Thessaloniki, which had made representations to the German occupation authorities. All members of the group belonged to the Slavic Macedonian community of northern Greece, which was regarded as Bulgarian by the Bulgarian authorities. They all declared Bulgarian ethnicity.

After his release, Tsipas and others set about reorganising the decimated KKE.