First came the mourning, then the handover of loved ones, then the funerals. On Friday it was Athina Katsara, the young mother of a toddler, carried in a white coffin out of Katerini’s church in the first funeral of the first “angel” to meet death in Greece’s worst ever train crash.
On Saturday it was Iphigenia Mitska, like so many of the disaster’s 57 victims in her early 20s, to whom family and friends bade farewell. She, too, was buried in a sealed white coffin in northern Giannitsa. And then it will be others – all identified through DNA samples provided by relatives – who will be laid to rest at the end of a three-day official mourning period for the nation but only the start of profound sadness for the families involved.
In the days since Intercity 62 – travelling from Athens to Thessaloniki with at least 350 on board – collided head-on with a cargo train hurtling along the same piece of track, Greece has been thrown into grief, mourning in the words of its own president “an unimaginable tragedy”.
Most killed were university students in the prime of life returning home from a public holiday marking the start of Orthodox Lent. The impact of the crash, outside the Thessalian town of Tempe, was such that rescuers combing the site last week struggled to find the remains of victims now thought to have died in temperatures that exceeded 1,300C when carriages exploded into flames. Retrieved bodies were invariably charred beyond recognition. Of the 66 who were wounded, more than half remain in hospital with six on life support. Survivors described being ejected through windows and struggling through acrid smoke and flames to jump to safety from derailed wagons that had slammed into a field.
Few train accidents in Europe in recent memory have been as bad; few have been felt so widely (Albania and Cyprus who lost their own are both also officially mourning this weekend); and none to date have stoked as much anger or soul-searching among Greeks. In the modern age of electrified locomotives and automated safety systems, the overarching question is ‘why’? It is one that has been increasingly levelled at the government as protesters have taken to the streets.
“We are, across society, in the midst of a furious grief,” says Fotini Tsalikoglou, one of the country’s foremost professors of psychology. “It’s a tragedy that has made people feel vulnerable and unprotected. There’s a pervasive sense that it could have been any one of us.”
For Tsalikoglou the horrific manner in which people perished – with relatives unable to bid goodbye to the bodies of kith and kin – has made the loss of life, in what is viewed as an accident that could have been prevented, even harder to accept.
“Rituals that have existed since Homer’s time, that have helped us make sense of death, become impossible when there is no, or little, trace of the dead, because it is as if a life didn’t exist,” she told the Observer. “Everyone has been able to identify with that.”
Before most of the victims were even born, railway unions were sounding the alarm. Clarion calls had intensified after the company’s privatisation as part of asset stripping during the country’s debt crisis. Barely 20 days before the collision, the federation of retired railroad workers had warned of the inherent dangers in a system running on empty. Last week, citing insufficient safeguards, inadequate signalling, overstretched staff and lack of proper training, unions predicted it was only a matter of time before another crash occurred if “responsible agencies consciously choose to ignore our demands and warnings that go back years”.
Their concerns are echoed elsewhere. With the network relying on employees working manually – usually through walkie-talkies – the system has been long regarded as the deadliest in Europe. Britain’s office for road and rail recently described it as posing the highest level of passenger risk on the continent.
Had procedures, collectively known as the European train control system, been installed – as intended three years ago – experts are convinced the tragedy could have been averted because automatic braking and other safety measures would have kicked in. Instead, the senior government official overseeing the contract resigned in disgust late last year at what were described as “unjustifiable delays”. The move came amid murmurings of corruption in the transport ministry, a department tasked with handling huge EU-funded projects. On Wednesday the transport minister announced he would assume political responsibility and step down, acknowledging the centre-right government’s reform efforts had failed.
In the absence of controls being in place, prime minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis has blamed the passenger train being diverted to the wrong track on “tragic human error”. And with his four-year term coming to an end with elections due this spring, he has pledged that “responsibilities will be assigned”.
The locomotives were travelling along the same track for close to 15 minutes before crashing into each other at 11.23pm on Tuesday. The stationmaster in Larissa, the main junction through which the passenger train had passed, could have prevented the crash had he made the right point change. The 59-year-old, who has admitted the oversight according to his lawyer, will testify before a magistrate on Sunday after his attorney, requesting a 24-hour delay, said new evidence had emerged.
But amid the anger and grief Greeks are not willing to accept that one man is to blame in a system that should never, they argue, have placed such responsibility on a single individual in the first place. “We’re all human and we all make mistakes,” said Alexis Pappas, 25, attending a fiery protest in Athens’ central Syntagma square. “We’re not machines but we have machines that should have been used. What’s happened is a big crime. Fellow Greeks were murdered. The government has to tell us why. Someone has to pay the price.”
