THESSALONIKI, Greece — When Yannis Antonoglou, 23, saw his friend’s girlfriend reading in the cafeteria of his train, he thought it was a funny coincidence. They had met a few days before at a friend’s party in Athens. They were both returning to Thessaloniki, and he thought they could share a cab or meet for coffee there.
But the cafeteria was at the front of the train that collided head-on with a freight train late Tuesday, in the deadliest rail crash in Greece’s history. Antonoglou learned about a day later that rescuers might not even find his friend’s girlfriend’s body.
“I could have stayed in the cafeteria,” Antonoglou, a college student, said in an interview. “And be charred with 30 other people.”
After years of pandemic-forced cancellations, Athens hosted a carnival last weekend, and many Greeks took advantage of the long weekend to travel or celebrate. Interviews with survivors and with victims’ families and friends revealed the crash’s tragic toll on young students and workers returning from vacation.
By Thursday, the death toll had climbed to 57, as search teams kept pulling bodies from the twisted wreckage. Some had to be identified using DNA because the crash was so violent that it left the bodies unrecognizable. Dozens of survivors were still in the hospital.
Across Greece, anger grew over the country’s dismal rail safety record. The two trains, carrying about 350 people, had raced toward each other for 12 minutes before colliding, according to the head of the federation of railway employees.
On Wednesday, protesters clashed in Athens with police outside the headquarters of Hellenic Train, the company responsible for maintaining Greece’s railways. Demonstrations were also reported in Larissa, near the site of the crash, and in Thessaloniki, the passenger train’s destination.
The Panhellenic Federation of Railway Employees declared a 24-hour strike, so no trains were running Thursday in Greece.
“I can’t separate my anger from my sadness,” said Alexia Kouvela, a friend of Elissavet Chatzivasileiou, a model and a soprano who went missing after the crash.
On Wednesday, Kouvela kept calling her friend’s phone. It rang, giving hope that Chatzivasileiou might not be in the burn wagons. But as hours passed, her hopes dimmed.
Kouvela blames the current government, but also the ones that came before, for the crash. “No one can claim that they didn’t know,” she said. “This is not an accident; it’s murder.”
Vaios Vlachos, 32, a geo-technician in Thessaloniki, and his girlfriend, Daphne Brella, who have been together since high school and share a fondness for creative costumes, had dressed up as marble busts and joined friends for carnival in Athens. Afterward, on Tuesday night, they rushed to the train to get home in time for work the next morning.
They usually travel between Athens and Thessaloniki by car, Vlachos’ brother, Evangelos, said, but higher gas prices had prompted them to take the train “to save money."
“And because they thought it was safer,” he added.
After the crash, passengers found Brella alive in the rubble, unable to move because she had suffered several fractures. She asked about Vlachos. Above her loomed the train car, in flames. She was taken to an intensive care unit. Vlachos’ mother gave doctors a sample of her blood for DNA identification in case he was found. On Thursday night, his body was identified.
Thessaloniki, Greece’s second-largest city, hosts tens of thousands of university students. Anastasia Papaggeli, 18, a student of agriculture at the city’s Aristotle University, the country’s largest, is among those missing after the crash. Her sister, Urania Papaggeli, 20, said that Anastasia had gone to the city of Patras, near Athens, for the carnival while dressed as an elf.
When Urania read about the deadly crash, she figured her sister was in the train’s third car. She called her, but there was no answer.
Elpida Choupa, 28, an architecture student at the same university, had also gone to Athens with a friend for the holiday; she is also missing. Her friend, who was in the crash, is in intensive care after undergoing head surgery, said Elpida’s brother, Costas Choupas, 21, who added that their mother “can’t even bear her thoughts, and the possibilities.”
The family of Dennis Rutsi, 22, who is from Thessaloniki, also has no news of him. “All of us are a mess,” said his brother, Christian Rutsi. “I feel empty.”
Fourteen of the crash victims were still in AHEPA Hospital in Thessaloniki as of Thursday morning.
One of them, Stergios Mineamis, 28, had been on his way to see his brother in the city. When the train stopped in Larissa, he went to the bathroom to smoke a cigarette, he said. Upon returning to his train car, he said, he heard a loud boom, then another and another as the lights went off and smoke filled the compartment.
Outside his window, he could see only flames and contorted steel “like blades,” he recalled.
“At every boom, I thought I was dead,” he said. “It was a disaster like a hell.”
He finally managed to jump off his tilted train car from a broken window, but his relief was quickly replaced by anger at the officials who showed up at the crash site.
“All of them are responsible for what happened,” he said. “I feel terrible for this country.”
Many college students who rushed en masse to a hospital in Thessaloniki to donate blood shared their feelings of rage and distrust. Doctors said that more than 500 people had shown up to give blood, an influx comparable in recent history only to the summer of 2018, when fires ravaged the seaside resort of Mati, in southern Greece.
“I have no trust in anything right now,” said Stefanos Radis, a 22-year-old student. He went to donate blood, he said, because “it’s people who are going to save people, not the government.”
Antonoglou was still in a state of distress Thursday afternoon, wondering how he was going to talk to his friend about his missing girlfriend. He ached for justice for what he described as an avoidable event.
“It was not divine judgment; people said it was going to happen,” he said. “Still, it happened.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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