Officials say that the bodies in the mass Greece have “bullets in the heads”

The workers were installing seats in a garden in the ancient Greek Saloniki, when the warm armies of a fragile white skull were paid.

They turned off the automatic equipment and assigned them to work with Pickaxes and the scoop. The crew found two skeletons, then more. By March, 33 groups of bones Lie in a narrow range of unique burial digging under the Byzantine castle.

“We have found many bullets in the heads, skulls,” said the supervising engineer, Harris Carraiseseses, who stands on the ground on which four months turned against the drilling.

It is common to find residues or old things in Greece. However, the Cool Call Call was a prison and was tortured and executed during the Civil War in Greece 1946-1949. Tens of thousands died in battles during the early Cold War between government forces backed by Western and left -wing rebels, brutal struggle with assassinations, kidnapping children and collective displacement. CBS News journalist George PolkWho had portrayed the Greek Greek government as corrupt, was Among those who were killed During the war.

The archaeological service of Greece has cleared the development site because the bones are less than 100 years. But the authorities in Napolis Seques, one of the outskirts of the coastal city of Saloniki, were pressed with digging, Say the opportunity you find It has “great historical and national importance.”

Simos Danielidis, who served as the mayor of Napolis Seikis since 1994, said their grandchildren are coming to the site in recent weeks, left flowers and asking the authorities to take a DNA test “so that they can recover their grandfather’s remains, grandfather, or uncle,” said Simos Danielidis, who has served as the mayor of Napolis Seikis since 1994.

Up to 400 Yedi Kole prisoners, according to historians and the Greek Communist Party. The elements with corpses – women’s shoes, handbag, loop – glimpses of life brief.

The legacy of wartime

As for the families of the Greeks supporting communism, the discovery in the National Resistance Garden is to revive a wartime heritage that kept asleep to avoid reformulating old enmities. The small site has become the first mass grave for the civil war in Greece.

The 19 -year -old government forces executed Agapios Sachainis after he refused to sign a declaration to give up his political beliefs.

“These are not simple issues,” said his nephew, who bears the same name during a recent visit to the site.

“It is about pregnancy inside you not only courage, but the values ​​and dignity that you will not give up – not even to save your private life,” said Agapios Sachinis, 78.

Sashini, a member of the retired Communist Council, was imprisoned in the 1960s because of his political activity during the dictatorship. Today, the Communist Party in Greece belongs to the main political current, due to its role in resisting the Second World War in the country.

He said that if the remains of uncle Sashinis are determined, he will burn them and keep the ashes at his home.

“I want Agapius near me, at least while I am alive,” he said.

Book of Play Cold War

The civil war began in Greece in the aftermath of World War II. After destroying the continent, it quickly lost his international attention, but the conflict was a turning point: US President Harry Truman’s policy of anti -communist intervention – Truman’s doctrine – was presented to Congress in 1947 as a means of directing money and military support to Greece.

The newly drilled bones in Thissaloniki, then, is a theatrical book that has continued to produce contracts of repression, social divisions and unique cemeteries in Asia, Africa and Latin America. Governments later faced the processes of violations of the Cold War era and atrocities a painful choice: to discover the past – as they tried in the investigation committees in Eastern Europe and many Latin American countries – or suppress it for fear of the new division.

The Greek emergency laws were gradually raised and were completely canceled until 1989. Summary trial records were not published and executed at all. No political force was pushed to excavate the suspected burial sites.

Politicians are still using a very cautious language when addressing the past, and the discovery of a defeated public reaction has been discovered. The discovery has not been treated directly by the right-wing government in the country-a reminder that many Greeks still find it easier to walk through the ghosts of the country rather than confronting them.

Decades ago, the Biology Park in Thessaloniki – a populated port of a million people with ruins of ancient Greek, Roman and Ottoman times, with strong and strong impacts – was a field on the outskirts of the city. Today, retirees are frequent and reserved by residential buildings full of middle -class families. During construction, the population whispered that the bones were discovered when the foundations were laid, but no investigation was conducted.

“Their generation”

The executions of the army’s firing teams extended to the fifties and were publicly announced, but the graves were unlimited and confidential. The author and historian Spearus Cozinopoulos, a Saloniki citizen, spent contracts searching for executions in the hands of Cole, including insults carried by prisoners in their last hours.

After a military court issued the death penalty, the chief guards, the prisoner convicted of solitary confinement in small cells, will barely large enough to stand. Many will use their last hours to write letters for their families. At dawn, the main goalkeeper and two other prisoners will return and hand them over to the shooting squad. Most of them are loaded on trucks to avoid attracting public attention. Sometimes they were leading their death on foot.

Most of the victims were barely adults – young Kozinopoulos called “their generation flowers”.

He said that two 17 -year -old female students, Eversia Niccoldo and Eva Coruzido, were executed while wearing their official uniforms.

“You shook me into the nucleus,” said Cosinopoulos.

DNA test

City officials take steps to conduct a DNA test on the remains, and urge missing families to provide genetic materials. In this way, the bodies can be identified and returned to relatives.

Agapios Sachinis, the seventy whose uncle was executed, among those who are eager to provide DNA.

Mayor Danielidis ordered the expansion of drilling to other parts of the garden in the coming weeks.

in statementThe city said that the efforts made to find other mass graves will continue “so that all the skeletons of people who lost their lives in this way during the dark years of civil war are not found and were not granted to honor the traditional attributed to the dead.”