She lost her mother, her sister, her son-in-law, her nephew and as she said, testifying at the Three-Member Court of Misdemeanors in the trial for Mati, it is inconceivable that this national tragedy of 2018 happened 32 kilometers from the Hellenic Parliament.
At the trial for the Eye, Maria Avramidou testified on Thursday (29.08.2024), who was in the area on July 23, but left before the fire arrived to return to Athens.
What remains in her mind, the last communications with her mother and sister, when now, what they had no warning of had happened, the fire had reached the Eye.
“Around quarter past 6 I talk to my sister and she was in a panic, in shock she tells me “the house will burn down” and shuts it down for me.
Usually, when there was a fire, there were fire engines in the area, as the witness testified, and thus the fire never passed Marathon. That day, however, as he said, he did not see fire engines on the way back.
From the moment her own people’s phones died, the witness started looking for them. “Around 7:30 someone picked up on 199. I told him I want to know what’s going on in Mati, they have four people, he said no “I don’t have anything, put the phone down and I’ll pick you up”. Of course he never got me.
I heard from somewhere that they started taking people to the hospitals and I’m talking to people to disperse to the hospitals… I hear that they are bringing people to the port of Rafina and I take bathrobes and towels and we head there. I was trying to find one of my own. Around 12 to one, I see someone I know coming out of a boat and he tells me there are many dead people behind and that’s where my legs were cut off. I could not believe that my people would not be saved. At 5 am the last boats were bringing foreign tourists and I ask if they will bring others. They tell me we will keep looking. We went to the port authority and we declare them missing.”
The witness also had to deal with the fact that her sister’s other son was outside of Athens and arranged for him to return. “When my nephew arrived, we went to Mati, the first thing we saw were burnt cars, we faced a scene of war, the wildness of the landscape was indescribable, he went with a friend and at some point they found our cars, intact. We kept searching for days. Eventually, they were identified through DNA.
The next few years were very difficult, I was afraid he wouldn’t hurt himself, he wouldn’t get involved, our lives were all ashes, we had to be born again and move on. It is something for us that will never pass, our life has become much worse in all areas, it is unimaginable that this happened 32 kilometers from the Hellenic Parliament, 104 people were burned, 58 burned, people drowned in the sea, it cannot be random event, definitely something went wrong, no business was done that day.”
The witness even said that she was lucky that she managed to leave at that time, as five minutes later a patrol car was sending people to Mati.
“They messed with us, they shook their finger at us, they did not respect us neither before the fire, nor after. Unfortunately, we felt that we were not being listened to by the previous Court”, the witness also emphasized.
“Pure Black”
Angeliki Palaiologopoulou, who was with the sister and son of the previous witness in the car, described a large explosion and falling as she characteristically said “absolute black”.
“For a long time there were voices, screams, I didn’t know what to do, a man grabs me and says “we’re burning, come on”, I knew there was a beach, I went down 60 steps, when I went down it also exploded”, he told the court, while afterwards as he described staying four hours at sea.
As the witnesses said they were waiting for help but it never came. “At some point we heard a faint light and heard from Duduka that two fishing boats will come,” said the witness.
Then, as he described when he heard on the news that “the prime minister and the others said that everything went well”, he thought that the people who were together might have survived. “Inside me I thought they wouldn’t live. Having lived through all this,” the witness emphasized.
“We went to the sea, very hot air was coming”
Eleni Papapostolou, together with her mother and her priest-father, fought the same struggle in the sea to be saved. “We went to the sea, very hot air was coming, it was all very worrying, my first concern was my father, because of his state of health…”, described the witness.
As he said at one point the scene became “more threatening, more intense, explosions started to be heard, for me it was war, everything went black”.
The witness tearfully recounted her father’s last moments. “When the sea started to get rough, I was trying with my mother to keep my father afloat, the waves were coming against us. Then for the first time I heard my father calling for help, I was very tired but I did everything to keep him afloat (crying), this lasted for an hour. He puts his hands up and says ‘God forgive me’, he turns to my mother ‘thank you for everything you’ve done for me’ and he says ‘to everyone…’ and that was his last word, he snorted and left life” said the witness.
The relatives of the victims, however, were also troubled when they had to provide DNA to identify their own people in order to be able to bury them, as the witness described in her testimony.
The trial continues on Monday, September 2.
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