Violent protests erupt in Athens on rail crash anniversary
Protesters have clashed with police in Athens as hundreds of thousands of people rallies across Greece to demand justice on the second anniversary of the country's deadliest train crash.
Fifty-seven people were killed when a passenger train filled with students collided head on with a freight train on Feb 28 2023, near the Tempi gorge in central Greece.
Two years later, the safety gaps that caused the crash have not been filled, an inquiry found on Thursday.
A separate judicial investigation remains unfinished and as yet no one has been convicted over the accident, fuelling popular anger.
Demonstrations were held across Greece in one of the biggest protests in the country in years.
But it escalated in Athens when a group of hooded youths hurled petrol bombs at police and tried to storm the barricades in front of parliament, while tear gas volleys fired by riot officers rang out across the centre.
Elsewhere in the city, tens of thousands of people poured into the central Syntagma Square in front of parliament, chanting 'murderers' against what they say is the state's role in the disaster.
On Friday, all international and domestic flights were grounded as air traffic controllers joined seafarers, train drivers, doctors, lawyers and teachers in a 24-hour general strike to pay tribute to the victims of the crash. Businesses were shut and theatres cancelled performances.
The centre-Right government of Kyriakos Mitsotakis, the Greek prime minister, which was re-elected after the crash in 2023, has faced repeated criticism by relatives of the victims for failing to initiate a parliamentary inquiry into political responsibility.
The government denies wrongdoing and says it is up to the judiciary to investigate the accident.
Friday's protests reflected mounting anger over the disaster in Greece, where mistrust of government is common following a debt crisis that lasted from 2009 to 2018 in which millions lost out on wages and pensions, and public services suffered from underfunding.
'The government hasn't done anything to get justice,' said Christos Main, 57, a musician at the Athens rally. 'This wasn't an accident, it was murder,' he said.
Another protester, who gave her name as Evi, said she was there to mourn the dead, 'but also because the government has tried to cover things up.'
On Friday, many pupils went to class dressed in black, a symbol of mourning. Others held up black balloons.
Protesters spray-painted the names of the dead in red on the ground in front of the parliament building.
'I have no oxygen' – a woman's last words in a call to emergency services – echoed in chants across the country.
A report on the investigation into the Tempe crash, released on Thursday, blamed human error, outdated infrastructure and major systemic failures for the collision.
The aftermath was marked by scenes of chaos, with surviving passengers describing tumbling carriages, fires and smashed windows as they scrambled to escape.
It was followed by the gruesome task of victim recovery and identification as many bodies were severely burnt or dismembered.
Funerals were held across numerous communities throughout Greece, many streamed or broadcast live, turning private grief into a shared national experience.
In a Facebook post, Mr Mitsotakis said his government would work to modernise the railway network and make it safer.
'That night, we saw the ugliest face of the country in the national mirror,' he wrote of the night of the crash. 'Fatal human errors met with chronic state inadequacies.'
Opposition parties have accused the government of covering up evidence and urged it to step down.
Next week, parliament is expected to debate whether to set up a committee to investigate possible political responsibility in the disaster.
In a survey carried out this week by Pulse pollsters, 82 per cent of Greeks asked said the train disaster was 'one of the most' or 'the most' important issue in the country and 66 per cent said they were dissatisfied with the investigations into the accident.
'Every day, the monster of corrupt power appears before us,' Maria Karystianou, whose daughter died in the crash and who heads an association of victims' families, told the crowd in Athens
Students shouted 'Text me when you get there' – the final message many of the victims' relatives sent them. A cardboard sign read 'Greece kills its children'.
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Baghdad emerges as a nexus of social mobility and commerce, with successful businessmen achieving not only wealth but also corresponding status. So this Islamic 'bourgeois revolution' extended beyond the marketplaces of Athens and Rome, where commerce had still been seen as a necessary evil. (You won't be surprised that Norberg follows his Cato Institute colleague Deirdre McCloskey in recasting 'bourgeois' as an explicitly positive concept.) Norberg's next leaping off point for laissez-faire liberalism is Song dynasty China, where a 12th-century poet observed that 'great ships sail only for profit'. Marauding Mongol hordes rudely interrupt the flow of progress by shrinking the Song state. But with a little help from Marco Polo – who described the old Song capital of Hangzhou as 'the greatest city which may be found in the world, where so many pleasures may be found that one fancies oneself in paradise' – the flame is kept alive in a new cultural and trading crossroads: Venice. When the pope complained to the Venetians about their economic relationship with Syria and Egypt, they replied: 'We are Venetians first, only then Christians.' Open, secular, undogmatic: the book's firmly established heroic template. The Netherlands, despite its remarkable military exploits in the Eighty Years' War, is revealed as 'a bourgeois society that wanted to make money not war'. And the same openness is found at the heart of Britain's 18th-century ascent. Norberg cites Voltaire's description: 'Go into the London Stock Exchange – a more respectable place than many a court – and you will see representatives from all nations gathered together for the utility of men. Here Jew, Mohammedan and Christian deal with each other as though they were all of the same faith, and only apply the word infidel to people who go bankrupt.' Finally, Norberg reaches America, completing his distilled histories of elevated cultures, lovingly interleaved into a unified history of enlightened humanity. Although Norberg never hides his strong ideological convictions, he often finds room for the counter-view, while also being unfailingly courteous in crediting other historians. Though it's unclear whether the book is meant as an introduction or a refresher, I ended up thinking it didn't matter either way: one would have to be an incredibly erudite reader not to find anything new and surprising at every turn, no matter how familiar the terrain. Books such as this are feats of engineering, rather than style or originality. Can the narrative structure survive the conceptual weight it is being asked to support? That's where the intelligence of Norberg's book is found. Norberg frequently revisits a familiar objection to his thesis: slavery. To what extent did that inhuman and unpaid debt enable these so-called golden ages? Very significantly. But Norberg argues that slavery was seldom the definitive causal factor in the growth stories he admires. Other societies indulged slavery, Norberg stresses, not only the celebrated and economically successful ones. A similar question has obvious resonance in our own context today. Hyper-globalisation delivers cheap fast-fashion clothing, for example, churned out by child-labour sweatshops in Asia. When growth is driven by wilful blindness, are 'rise' and 'decline' appropriate concepts? The approved stamp 'artisan' might be an overused cliché today, but you can see what the concept is being defined against. I finished Peak Human unsure about something even more fundamental: the influence of mass digital information on our subliminal attitude towards knowledge. In Norberg's sunny enlightenment world-view, the exchange of information is the engine of progress. Assimilators thrive and the curious win. But the digital age – in which information is exchanged without any friction – now overwhelms us. We often feel defeated by information rather than excited by it. TS Eliot's aphorism feels truer than ever: 'Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?' If a part of us wants to switch off – literally and metaphorically – we are not necessarily turning away from the kind of creative human interaction that Norberg celebrates, but instead trying to salvage a more textured human experience. Today's ceaseless exchange of mostly meaningless pixelated 'content' seems to be undermining our higher instincts rather than supporting them. AI and the manipulation of digital information adds an extra layer of underlying disquiet. Our brilliance at manufacturing information is becoming inversely correlated with our confidence that the information is trustworthy. For all our material advances, there's a feeling of being tossed around on digital seas that we don't quite understand. For that reason, Peak Human feels incomplete. Norberg's spectrum charts 'peak-human' relative to 'declining-human'. But aren't we facing an even bigger question today: 'actually human' vs 'non-human'? When the sizeable chunk of human experience is reduced to watching rotating adverts on an iPhone, what Norberg wrote about Sparta leaving 'no literature, no poetry, no art, no architecture' becomes just as applicable to our vacant technological age as it was to Sparta's closed and military one. Norberg might counter: new technology is always unsettling but rarely turns out frightening. I'd say: this time could be different. We'll see. It's only a hunch, but I think this underlying anxiety about our place in the world is seeping into political restiveness. The paradox, of course, is that intellectual loss of confidence and bewilderment manifests itself as a yearning for childlike simplicity. 'Hard times create strongmen,' Norberg warns us near the end of the book, 'and strongmen create even harder times.' He's writing about the decline of the Dutch Republic, and the prince of Orange. But of course the shadow of America's own prince of orange, Donald Trump, falls across the page. The next peak for humanity feels distant. Ed Smith is director of the Institute of Sports Humanities Peak Human: What We Can Learn from the Rise and Fall of Golden Ages Johan Norberg Atlantic, 512pp, £22 Purchasing a book may earn the NS a commission from who support independent bookshops [See also: Dickens's Britain is still with us] Related This article appears in the 04 Jun 2025 issue of the New Statesman, The Housing Trap
