More bodies of executed civil war-era prisoners uncovered under Greek city park
THESSALONIKI, Greece — Another series of unmarked graves — this one containing 14 individuals from Greece's civil war era — have been dug up in a park in a suburb near the northern Greek city of Thessaloniki, local officials said Saturday.
As in the previous tight cluster of unmarked burial pits excavated earlier this year in Neapolis-Sykies, the bodies belong to prisoners who were held in a nearby Byzantine fortress. The prisoners, alleged communists and sympathizers, were executed between 1946 and 1953, according to historians.
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Heads, torsos of executed 1940s war prisoners dug up in city park in Greece
Another series of unmarked graves — this one containing 14 individuals from Greece's civil war era — have been dug up in a park in a suburb near the northern Greek city of Thessaloniki, local officials said Saturday. As in the previous tight cluster of unmarked burial pits excavated earlier this year in Neapolis-Sykies, the bodies belong to prisoners who were held in a nearby Byzantine fortress. The prisoners, alleged communists and sympathizers, were executed between 1946 and 1953, according to historians. The Yedi Kule castle, also known by its Greek name Eptapyrgio ("Seven Towers") was a prison where communist sympathizers were tortured and executed during Greece's 1946-49 Civil War and immediately afterward. The new burial pits were uncovered on the site of a municipal park undergoing renovation, including the installation of new benches. The graves were not far beneath the surface, Haris Charismiadis, the supervising engineer of the park project, told The Associated Press. Supervising engineer Haris Charismiadis stands next to human remains believed to belong to prisoners executed during or after Greece's 1946-49 Civil War in Thessaloniki, northern Greece, Saturday, June 7, 2025. Giannis Papanikos / AP The renovation project is not currently a priority for local mayor Simos Daniilidis. "We insisted on continuing the digging for the graves," he said. Charismiadis, who said most of the current batch of bodies were found during the past week, is certain there are more people buried nearby, including, probably, under the tarmac of streets adjacent to the park. An archaeologist is assisting in the digging. In contrast with the 33 bodies found earlier this year, which were lying side by side, the recently found bodies are jumbled, as if thrown randomly, and hastily, in a heap. Torsos and heads are separated. Previously, Charismiadis said teams had uncovered execution victims with "many bullets in the heads, the skulls." Items found with the bodies — a woman's shoe, a handbag, a ring — offer glimpses into the lives cut short. When Yedi Kule prisoners were executed, their families were often not notified and they didn't get to retrieve their bodies. Some found out about the fate of their loved ones from newspapers — one family happened upon the news while on the bus they had taken to the prison to bring their relative a fresh change of clothes. The grisly find included the discovery of footwear, including the remnants of a woman's shoe. Sykies municipality Relatives of the executed have clamored for DNA tests to be done to ascertain the identity of the found bodies. Testing has not begun yet. Tens of thousands died in the early Cold War-era battles between Western-backed government forces and left-wing insurgents, a brutal conflict with assassination squads, child abductions and mass displacements. CBS News journalist George Polk, who had depicted the right-wing Greek government as corrupt, was among those killed during the war. In a statement earlier this year, the city said efforts to find other mass graves would continue "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."
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Tatyana Popovytch had contacted every agency she could think of. She had walked every step her son Vladislav could have taken after the Russians opened fire at his car, leaving him to flee with a bullet in his leg. She had looked in mass graves, reviewed pictures of the dead, watched exhumations. And after a month, she knew no more than when she had started. Then a stranger called. Serhii had just been released from a Russian prison in Kursk. At morning roll call, the prisoners could not see one another, but they could hear each person state their full name and home village. Serhii memorised as many names and places as he could – 10 in total, he said – and on 9 May 2022 he called Tatyana to say that he had heard her son's voice. Like Vladislav, Serhii was a civilian captured from Bucha at the start of the war, when hundreds of civilians were taken from this area. Vladislav was 29 at the time. Now 32, he is still in the prison in Kursk. Serhii couldn't explain to Tatyana why he had been released and Vladislav hadn't. Tatyana was just glad to hear that her son was alive. "I was so overjoyed I lost the stutter I'd had since he was taken," she said. Three years later, to the day, Tatyana was sitting in a café in Bucha, not far from where her son was abducted, looking over the scant evidence that he was still alive: two letters from him – short, boilerplate texts, written in Russian, telling her he was well fed and well looked after. Each letter had taken around three months to reach Tatyana, making it hard for her to feel very connected to her son at any point in time. "My son is very gentle and sensitive," she said, with the pained expression of a parent who cannot protect their child. She was looking at pictures of Vlad ballroom dancing – a hobby from a young age. "He is so vulnerable," she said. "I worry that he will lose his sanity there." According to Ukrainian authorities, nearly 16,000 Ukrainian civilians are still in captivity in Russian prisons after being abducted by the invading army – not counting the more than 20,000 Ukrainian children estimated to have been taken to Russia. There are growing fears now among their many thousands of loved ones, amid the apparent progress towards peace talks, that they could be forgotten or lost in the process. And those fears appear to be justified. Under the Geneva Convention, there is a recognised mechanism for exchanging prisoners of war, but no such mechanism exists for the return of captured civilians, leaving even top Ukrainian and international officials searching for an explanation as to how they might be brought home. "When I attend official meetings, at the ombudsman's office or elsewhere, no one talks about getting the civilians back in the event of a ceasefire," said Yulia Hripun, 23, whose father was kidnapped early on in the war from a village just west of Kyiv. 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"You want to believe he is coming home, at the same time you can't believe it," said Petro Sereda, 61, a bus driver from Irpin, near Kyiv, whose son Artym was taken prisoner more than three years ago. "It is extremely difficult." Petro and his wife live in shipping container-style temporary accommodation in Irpin, because their home was destroyed in the invasion. Even three years on, every time the phone rings Petro thinks it might be Artym. "It is one thing to have a letter saying he is alive, but to hear his voice… That would be the joy that he is really alive." The families live like this, in desperate hope. The dream is that they get to see their loved ones again. It is not a straightforward dream, though – some fear that Russian captivity will have caused lasting damage. Tatyana, whose ballroom-dancing son Vladislav was abducted from Bucha, said she shuddered to hear the Russian language now "because it is the language my son is being tortured in." 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