Three years after Greece's deadliest rail disaster, one survivor from Thessaloniki says she is finally ready to speak in court about the night that changed her life forever.
Maria Lazaridou was travelling with her 6.5-month-old daughter in the third carriage of the passenger train that collided head-on with a freight train at Tempi on 28 February 2023. Fifty-seven people were killed, and dozens were injured, plunging the country into shock. Lazaridou witnessed the chaos at close range. She recalls three young women who "disappeared in a minute" and another who had been watching a film in her boyfriend's arms and did not survive.
In the immediate aftermath, she says, fear gave way to anger and then to guilt. "At first, I had the fear of death. Then this became anger. Anger at what everyone was saying and what was being broadcast by relevant and irrelevant people, but also anger because no one was taking responsibility for what happened," she tells Voria. That anger later turned inward. "Guilt because I lived and the girl next to me did not. Guilt because I was close to 30 and had had a child, so I had fulfilled part of my dreams, and she was 20 and had not yet lived her life. I put it all on myself. Why did I go on that trip?"
The journey had been spontaneous. She decided to visit her sister in Trikala for the Carnival weekend after learning that her mother would be travelling as well. On the return train, shortly before Tempi, her baby began to cry. "At the moment I was putting the bottle in my little girl's mouth, the collision happened."
She remembers darkness and then waking on the carriage floor, surrounded by smoke and fire. Her mother was beside her, but her baby was nowhere to be seen. "My baby", she screamed, again and again. The infant had fallen under a seat. Lazaridou could reach only with her hand. A young man in a yellow shirt reassured her, "We will find her". Her mother managed to pull the child out.
Mother and daughter escaped with the help of other passengers. Blood was running down Lazaridou's face. A woman named Zoe gave her jacket to wrap the baby. A man carried her down from the train. The child suffered a skull fracture and had shards of glass in her head and eyes.
"It took 2.5 years for me to say today that I am well," she says. "I feel that I lived so that my child could live. If my little one had not existed, I do not know if I would have got off the train." Now, she says, she speaks "so that what happened is not forgotten" and so that those responsible might "feel what we experienced".
For months, she avoided television coverage and struggled to process the trauma. She later contacted the Association of People Affected by the Tempi Accident but did not complete the registration process. Asked whether she believes in justice, she pauses. "I am not sure. Perhaps something will happen so that there is justice for so many victims. I hope and wish that the real responsible parties are punished. We owe it to those who are not with us, but above all, we must not forget."
On 23 March, Lazaridou will testify for the first time at the trial in Larissa, supporting the prosecution. No one had taken her statement previously. She also plans to join a march in central Thessaloniki marking the anniversary.
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"What I feel is not only my own experience," she says. "There were many of us trying to come out of this, but neither you nor we must forget. Not to forget, that is the only thing I want to shout."
By Maria Ritzaleou - adapted from Greek by Vassia Barba
