THESSALONIKI, Greece — One other collection of unmarked graves — this one containing 14 people from Greece’s civil struggle period — have been dug up in a park in a suburb close to the northern Greek metropolis of Thessaloniki, native officers mentioned Saturday.
As within the earlier tight cluster of unmarked burial pits excavated earlier this year in Neapolis-Sykies, the our bodies belong to prisoners who had been held in a close-by Byzantine fortress. The prisoners, alleged communists and sympathizers, had been executed between 1946 and 1953, in accordance with historians.
The Yedi Kule citadel, additionally identified by its Greek title Eptapyrgio (“seven towers”) was a jail the place communist sympathizers had been tortured and executed throughout Greece’s 1946-49 Civil Battle and instantly afterward.
The burial pits had been uncovered on the location of a municipal park present process renovation, together with the set up of recent benches. The graves weren’t far beneath the floor, Haris Charismiadis, the supervising engineer of the park mission, informed The Related Press.
The renovation mission will not be presently a precedence for native mayor Simos Daniilidis. “We insisted on persevering with the digging for the graves,” he mentioned. Charismiadis, who mentioned many of the present batch of our bodies had been discovered through the previous week, is definite there are extra folks buried close by, together with, most likely, below the tarmac of streets adjoining to the park. An archaeologist is aiding within the digging.
In distinction with the 33 our bodies discovered earlier this yr, which had been mendacity facet by facet, the not too long ago discovered our bodies are jumbled, as if thrown randomly, and rapidly, in a heap. Torsos and heads are separated.
When Yedi Kule prisoners had been executed, their households had been usually not notified and so they didn’t get to retrieve their our bodies. Some discovered concerning the destiny of their family members from newspapers — one household occurred upon the information whereas on the bus they’d taken to the jail to convey their relative a recent change of garments.
Family members of the executed have clamored for DNA exams to be performed to establish the id of the discovered our bodies. Testing has not begun but.