One other sequence of unmarked graves — this one containing 14 people from Greece’s civil battle period — have been dug up in a park in a suburb close to the northern Greek metropolis of Thessaloniki, native officers stated Saturday.
As within the earlier tight cluster of unmarked burial pits excavated earlier this 12 months in Neapolis-Sykies, the our bodies belong to prisoners who have been held in a close-by Byzantine fortress. The prisoners, alleged communists and sympathizers, have been executed between 1946 and 1953, in response to historians.
The Yedi Kule fort, additionally identified by its Greek title Eptapyrgio (“Seven Towers”) was a jail the place communist sympathizers have been tortured and executed throughout Greece’s 1946-49 Civil Warfare and instantly afterward.
The brand new burial pits have been uncovered on the positioning of a municipal park present process renovation, together with the set up of latest benches. The graves weren’t far beneath the floor, Haris Charismiadis, the supervising engineer of the park mission, informed The Related Press.
Supervising engineer Haris Charismiadis stands subsequent to human stays believed to belong to prisoners executed throughout or after Greece’s 1946-49 Civil Warfare in Thessaloniki, northern Greece, Saturday, June 7, 2025.
Giannis Papanikos / AP
The renovation mission isn’t presently a precedence for native mayor Simos Daniilidis. “We insisted on continuing the digging for the graves,” he stated. Charismiadis, who stated many of the present batch of our bodies have been discovered throughout the previous week, is for certain there are extra individuals buried close by, together with, most likely, below the tarmac of streets adjoining to the park. An archaeologist is helping within the digging.
In distinction with the 33 our bodies discovered earlier this 12 months, which have been mendacity facet by facet, the lately discovered our bodies are jumbled, as if thrown randomly, and unexpectedly, in a heap. Torsos and heads are separated.
Beforehand, Charismiadis stated groups had uncovered execution victims with “many bullets in the heads, the skulls.” Gadgets discovered with the our bodies — a lady’s shoe, a purse, a hoop — supply glimpses into the lives minimize quick.
The grisly discover included the invention of footwear, together with the remnants of a lady’s shoe.
Sykies municipality
Family of the executed have clamored for DNA assessments to be finished to establish the identification of the discovered our bodies. Testing has not begun but.
In a press release earlier this 12 months, town stated efforts to search out different mass graves would proceed “so that all the skeletons of the people who lost their lives in this way during the dark years of the Civil War and were not given the honors traditionally attributed to the dead are found.”
