Η ΚΑΘΗΜΕΡΙΝΗ

Her father was killed just three days after writing this letter, on February 13, 1941. The circumstances are not clear, though fellow soldiers said that he was mortally injured by a shell that exploded right beside him. Nikolaos Zografos's death was not instantaneous, witnesses said. The Hellenic Army's Historical Records Department places the soldier as having died on the battlefield a few kilometers northwest of the eastern Albanian town of Pogradec. To this day, however, his family doesn't know whether or where he was buried.

“No matter how many years go by, you never forget a parent, and especially one like him,” says Zografou.

“I wish I could find out whether anything exists of him, even his bones.”

Search launched

The task of locating and identifying soldiers who fell in the 1940-1941 Greco-Italian War is long overdue in Greece and for people like Zografou it is an unpaid debt that burdens not just herself, but also other members of the family who know her father only through stories and photographs.

In late January, a joint Greek-Albanian committee launched excavations at the Klisura Pass in Albania and found the remains of two Greek soldiers on the very first day. The search is ongoing and the discoveries are mounting. No official figures have been released yet, but it is estimated that the number of missing Greek soldiers is close to 8,000.

Agathoklis Panagoulias is an economist who has dedicated two decades of his life to researching the casualties of the Albanian front and has a document from the Italian authorities suggesting that hundreds lie in the Klisura Pass area, which the Greeks managed to capture from the Italians in a major battle in mid-January 1941. “When the war ended, the Italians collected the bodies of the Greeks and buried them in the valley,” he says.

Zografou has been motivated by these findings and has given Greek authorities a sample of her DNA in the hope that one day they will make a match with her father's remains. The first samples of genetic material from victims' relatives were collected in 2015 by the Molecular Biology Center of the 401 General Military Hospital of Athens, but the launch of the search operation in January has prompted dozens of relatives to come forward.

“We have an obligation to these men, even now, because their blood flows in our veins,” says 59-year-old Eleni Athanasiadou, Zografou's daughter.

She never met her grandfather but has heard all sorts of stories about him which never fail to move her. As the cases of families who lost people in the 1974 invasion of Cyprus have shown, loss is a feeling that can be passed down from generation to generation.

“Everyone regards October 28 [1940, when Greece rejected an Italian ultimatum and entered World War II] as a holiday, but in our household it's an emotionally charged day,” she says. “It's not that we're in mourning – that would be an exaggeration – but there is something that seems to burn deep inside us.”

The location reported as being where her grandfather died is a long way from the area where the current search effort is taking place, but there is no information concerning where he may have been moved or buried.

“They were buried next to each other, head to toe, like a zipper, in a string of makeshift graves,” says Michalis Polymiadis, a man who went in search of his great-uncle's remains at the same location in 2011, where, like Zografos, he had served in the 22nd Infantry Regiment.

However, Polymiadis later learned that the remains of the dead in that area had been disinterred several years earlier and were probably kept in unmarked church ossuaries.