Revolution in Portugal - Flowers in place of bullets

In 1974 Celeste Caeiro was 40 years old and lived in a room she had rented to Chiado, with her mother and a daughter she raised without the help of her former companion. He worked on Braancamp street, cleaning the restaurant Franjinhas, which he had opened a year earlier. The inauguration day had been precisely 25 April 1973.

The manager wanted to celebrate the restaurant's first anniversary by offering carnations to the clientele. He had bought red carnations and had them in the restaurant when he heard on the radio that a revolution was on the street. He dismissed everyone and added, as Celeste recalls in the interview: "Take the flowers home, it is unnecessary to be here withering."

Celeste then went from Metro to Rossio and then remembered to have seen the "chaimites" and asked a soldier what that was. The soldier told him of the idea of ​​going to Largo do Carmo, where Marcelo Caetano had taken refuge. The soldier, who had been there since very early, asked for a cigarette and Celeste, who did not smoke, could only offer him a nail.

The soldier soon put the flower on the barrel of the shotgun. The gesture was seen and imitated. On the way, on foot, to Largo do Carmo, Celeste was offering carnations and the soldiers were putting these carnations in more barrels of more shotguns.

The G-3 so adorned helped the people to distinguish friendly troops. It was one more motive to ignore the repeated appeals of the captains to keep the civilians at home, another reason to come to the street and to fraternize with the liberating troops. "After all, instead of shooting, the rifles had flowers," says Celeste Caeiro.