Greece: Church bells, 24-hour strike and protests mark a year since country’s worst train crash
Greece protests
Church bells tolled, a 24-hour strike halted rail services, and tens of thousands of workers and students marched through the Greek capital city of Athens, on Wednesday (Feb 28) to mark the anniversary of the country’s deadliest train crash which killed 57 people and injured dozens more.
Protesters demand justice for victims
More than 30,000 striking Greek workers and students took to the streets in Athens while a 24-hour strike halted rail services across the country and disrupted urban transport in the Greek capital to commemorate the head-on collision on February 28, 2023.
The protesters demanded justice and bigger pay raises as they blamed official failings and an unsafe rail system for the deadly incident. “We don’t forget, we demand justice,” read the banner of those who marched in Athens.
A year ago, a passenger train from Athens to the northern city of Thessaloniki collided head-on with a freight train. The collision led to the death of 57 people, many of them young students returning home after a long weekend.
The collision, which many see as the result of government neglect of railway safety systems and protocolsdespite years of warnings from rail workers, led to days of mass and often violent protests.
Churches across the country rang their bells 57 times, on Wednesday to represent the number of those killed.
24-hour strike
The strike on Wednesday was called by Greece’s largest public-sector union ADEDY which represents around half a million workers.
However, over the day, many others, including students joined the march and wrote the names of the people who lost their lives in front of the heavily guarded parliament.
Brief clashes were also reported between police and protesters in Athens and during a similar protest in Thessaloniki.
The union workers, including air traffic controllers, taxi drivers and public transport workers, were also protesting against what they said were insufficient pay rises, the first after 14 years in the public sector.
They said that the increases were not enough to offset the impact of rising living costs and called for a 10 per cent across-the-board hike.
‘Day of pain’
“Today is a day of pain,” Antonis Psaropoulos, whose 19-year-old daughter Marthi died in the collision, told AFP. “For all of us, time stopped on February 28, 2023, a cursed day... a black hole in time,” Psaropoulos added.
A memorial service was also held at the crash site in the valley of Tempe, which is around 273 kilometres from Athens where grieving families of the victims and survivors left wreaths and flowers. “Fifty seven souls want justice,” read a placard at the ceremony.
‘National trauma’
The bells of every church in the country rang in the morning 57 times to mark this “national trauma” and “collective failure,” said Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis. “As a prime minister, as a citizen and as a father, I share the country’s grief.”
Amid the ongoing investigation, there is no definitive account of what happened on that day and whose fault it was.
(With inputs from agencies)