Two years to the day since 57 people died and dozens were injured in Greece’s worst train crash in history, hundreds of thousands of protesters filled plazas around the country and a general strike paralysed the transport network in an outpouring of anger over the government’s handling of the tragedy.
By 11am on Friday, more than 100,000 people had already gathered in Syntagma Square in Athens. Thousands who could not get to the area due to packed metro trains instead vented their anger outside stations in the capital’s suburbs.
The huge crowds in Athens and elsewhere reflected multiple opinion polls indicating that most Greeks believed officials concealed vital evidence after the crash, slowing down an investigation that is still incomplete.
“I think all of us wanted to say: ‘You have to take responsibility,’” said 27-year-old Paris Economou, a drama student who attended the Athens demonstration.
“Young people like me needlessly lost their lives,” he said. “And it boils down to this: either the state is so inadequate it can’t run a modern railway system, or we should believe the conspiracy theories and everything they say about a cover-up. One or the other is true.”
As Economou spoke, the crowd dispersed as the otherwise peaceful protest was eclipsed by the eruption of violence between rock-throwing youths and riot police firing teargas. A young woman dressed in black, her head covered with a headscarf, stopped to show the cardboard placard she was carrying, which bore the message: “It was state murder.”
On the night of 28 February 2023 two trains collided in the gorge of Tempe in central Greece: an intercity Thessaloniki-bound passenger train that had set off from Athens crammed with students, and a freight train that was moving north to south. The head-on collision was of such ferocity that the front carriages of the two locomotives exploded into a fireball that instantly incinerated several of the victims. The remains of many were never found.
Questions over what the cargo train was carrying has fuelled much of the public outrage. This week, a 178-page report, released by an independent investigative committee, did not exclude its wagons containing highly flammable chemicals, citing “the possible presence” of an “unknown fuel” at the site of the crash.
The relatives of the victims, who have spent two years trying to get to the bottom of the tragedy, have for many become potent symbols of the public desire for transparency and demand for answers.
Poll after poll has agreed: with a trial yet to begin and no government official ever convicted, Greeks have lost trust in public institutions and their judicial system. “That’s why today’s were the biggest protests this country has witnessed since the collapse in 1974 of the military dictatorship,” said Petros Constantinou, a prominent figure in the leftwing activist movement who had spent days marshalling support for the rallies.
Not since he first won office in July 2019 has the prime minister, Kyriakos Mitsotakis, a former banker, confronted such unrest.
Anger over the response to the crash – not least the controversial decision to rapidly clean up the site and remove debris that included vital evidence and human remains – has been exacerbated by the perceived and growing sense of a government cover-up. Within days of the crash, in a move that has yet to be fully explained, authorities rushed to gravel over and cement the area.
On Friday the embattled leader admitted that “nothing will be as it was before”.
“That night we saw the worst face of the country in the national mirror,” he wrote in an online post. “Fatal human mistakes bonded with chronic state insufficiencies and violently derailed our certainties.”
Until recently, Mitsotakis has proved to be adept at handling crises – a talent that has helped reinforce a rare sense of political stability in a nation that for years was roiled by economic and social crisis.
But Friday’s outpouring of dissent, with demonstrations taking place across time zones in more than 270 cities in Greece and abroad, has piled on the pressure as never before. It is pressure that will grow when the main opposition Pasok party leader, Nikos Androulakis, submits a vote of no confidence in the government next week.
Among those who took to the streets on Friday were a sizeable cohort of once fervent Mitsotakis supporters. They, too, are now united with opponents of the ruling New Democracy party in believing that the tragedy – and its fallout – is indicative of everything that is wrong with their country. “A lot of us are very disappointed. Tempe is just the tip of the iceberg,” said one veteran conservative who had once held a public position and preferred to go unnamed.
Addressing the crowd from a podium in front of the Greek parliament, Maria Karystianou, whose daughter was killed in the disaster, and who heads the Tempe Victims Association, struck a chord that he and so many others believe.
“Every day, the monster of corrupt power stands before us,” she said. “You have insulted and dishonoured our dead. The bodies and bones of our children remain unburied and hidden. You have committed the ultimate sacrilege, and you will receive what is due through the vengeance of the dead.”
