THE DAY GREECE STOPPED BREATHING

“Today we are all young!” yells a voice from the back of the subway “Tomorrow we’ll see.”

"Greece eats her own children," says my mum while she cooks, like it’s a universal truth that will never change. I'm just a kid—I don’t know what it means. I can only imagine a huge monster, the size of Cronos, picking me up and throwing me into his mouth.

A few years later, my teacher says the same while we are discussing career choices. The monster is not a monster anymore. It looks very human—well-dressed, well-spoken. Nothing like the devils you read about as a child. Instead of hiding under my bed, it would sit on our table. The constant worry of my parents about my future, during 2015 crisis, while they discussed sending me abroad. They would hunger themselves before they let Greece suffocate me as well. You can’t kill it with a sword. You can’t even punch it. It doesn’t just eat my skin; it eats my dreams, my thoughts, my hopes, and my will to stay in the country that birthed me.

"Greece eats her own children" echoes in my mind while politicians let neighborhoods burn, let us drown, let our mothers grieve—all the while making promises of a better tomorrow that never seems to dawn.

Except on days like this. February 28, 2025. The day Greece stopped breathing.

If you don’t know, two years ago, on the same day, February 28, 2023, two trains crashed into each other on the railway that connects the two largest cities of Greece, Athens and Thessaloniki. One was a passenger train filled with students returning home from their universities. The other was an intermodal freight train.

Fifty-seven people died, while hundreds of others were injured.

Spoiler alert: justice has yet to be served.

"Human error," they called it while I watched the news terrified. Biting on my nails and thinking of all the times I had boarded that train myself. You see, most Greeks—if not all of us—have used that railway line more than once in our daily lives because it doesn’t just connect Athens and Thessaloniki; it connects everything in between. It’s the same railway line that people use every day to go to work, as did I. It was supposed to be safe. “Call me when you get there” became a symbolic phrase for the tragedy. Parents waiting for a call that never came through. It could have been any one of us on that train, and everyone was haunted by that thought alone.

Then all the other questions started piling up—the hows, the whys.

If it was a human error, why the hell weren’t there any safety measures in place to prevent it in the first place? If a human error can cause such a tragedy, why wasn’t there a more qualified person in charge? Why was there a shortage of staff? Is it really an accident when railway staff had warned you time and time again, and you continued to ignore them? When you had been funded to update the railway system, but you chose not to? When the Minister of Infrastructure and Transport had, just days before, unironically vouched for the safety of the railways, arguing with anyone who dared to disagree—only for a fellow minister to come out afterward on television and claim, "Well, if we had told you they weren’t safe… you wouldn’t use them."

Yeah. No shit, Sherlock.

They knew. They ignored it. They let it happen.

That’s not an accident—it’s murder.

And it was never a question of if. It was a question of when.

Two years later, not only have they refused to take accountability, but the system remains as flawed as before. The government has attempted multiple times to hide and tamper with the evidence. What was the freight train carrying that caused the fire and explosion that killed most of the victims—burning them alive? Why was it transporting 3.5 tons of flammable liquids? Why did the authorities rush to clear the wreckage and backfill the site?

All these questions and more were the reasons millions of us took to the streets on February 28, 2025, demanding answers and change.

I live outside the center, in a calm neighborhood, and the subway station near my house is never full—there has never been a line to get in. Except today.

When I stepped inside the subway, I barely had enough space to breathe but I suddenly had this sense of pride. Like I was a part of something larger than me. People gave up their seats, talking to each other like we were all old pals, sharing advice and tips about the protest in case it turned bad. Everyone knew that a large crowd would gather in the center of Athens, outside Parliament, for a peaceful protest. But no one imagined just how many of us would be there.

"Today we are all young!" yells a voice from the back of the subway. "Tomorrow, we’ll see."

That line really stuck with me. I had decided to go because I am fighting for my future but I realized than so many people were fighting for their past. Greece’s children—of all ages—had come to fight. Some of them had their hopes and dreams eaten away by Greece herself, but they were here, bruised and messed up, to honor the 57 victims and grieve their loss.

October 28, 1940 is celebrated as the “OCHI” day in Greece, which means “NO” in English. It was the day Ioannis Metaxas rejected the ultimatum made by Italian dictator Benito Mussolini and the subsequent Hellenic counterattack against the invading Italian forces at the mountains of Pindus during the Greco-Italian War and Greek resistance during the Axis occupation. Well I guess February 28, was meant to be my generation’s “OCHI” day and how could any one of us be missing?

A few months ago, an audio recording was released of one of the victims trapped inside the train.

"Help," she cries. "I don’t have oxygen."

Unironically enough, that is how most of us have felt in this country—suffocated by a system that never seems to change and rots a little more every day.

But that system forgets—the very oxygen of a country is its people. And if the people decide to stop, hold their breath for even a second, they can suffocate it just as much as it suffocates them.

In addition to protests across the entire country, there was a national strike. Schools, businesses, restaurants, cafes, playgrounds, retail stores—all shut down.

Greece stopped breathing for a day.

Her children held their breath, and she could do nothing but watch.

This movement was powerful, unified, and historical. Even taxi drivers offered free rides for anyone needing to get to the rally. Teachers came with their students—not to teach them history through textbooks, but to teach them in the streets, live. Parents brought their sons and daughters, holding their tiny banners, as we all listened to the families closest to the victims take the stand.

"I like this version of Greece," says a protester next to me, tears in her eyes, as the speaker reads the names of the 57 lives lost.

Every time she says a name, the crowd of millions yells back, "Present."

Chills run down my body every time. I realize that I—and everyone around me—have been on that train since the day we were born. We all carry those 57 people inside us.

And we are all determined for one thing, for one cause—to never let it happen again. The sky is filled with balloons, names written on them alongside symbolic words. The streets are filled with signs:

"WE HAVE NO OXYGEN."
"NO MORE HIDING."
"JUSTICE."

The thing is, I love my country. Greece is beautiful—everyone knows that. From the islands to the mountains, from its history to its art. The nightlife, the chaos—everything about it drips beauty. But along with beauty, it drips tragedy. And it has been that way for as long as it has existed.

After all, it was Aristotle, a fellow Greek, who argued that tragedy is "an imitation of an action that is serious, complete, and of a certain magnitude […] through pity and fear affecting the proper purgation of these emotions."

But tragedies like Tempi shouldn’t define us. It should be events like today.

I don’t know if that’s possible. The only thing I know is that we must keep trying—because I’m exhausted from living in a place that the world sees as a paradise, while it’s hell inside.

Greece is no longer defined by its beauty, but by the monsters that govern it. It is only fitting that the country of theater has such good actors in charge—putting on a great show for the rest of the world.

There’s a Greek song that captures this better than I ever could, this is the best translation I can give.

“I’ve built this country; I have mourned it and I have cursed it. I’ve kissed this soil; I have honored it and I’ve forgiven it. The blood of my ancestors has brought me centuries-old guilt. But at 40, I'm far too old to be paying an unpayable bill. […] What am I to do with this country? This country pushing me inside a plane. I don’t know who I am or where I am going, I only I am running. Fuck you, for I still love you. You’ll haunt me anywhere I go. I was your child and you kicked me out before dawn.”

- Γεράσιμος Ευαγγελάτος

And I’m sad. But most of all, I’m angry. Because I do love you. Because I don’t want to leave. I want to stay. Because there’s nothing like walking the streets at 3 am and listening to Greek traditional music while men and women are dancing in the pavements. There’s nothing like the taste of Food seafood, good company, and the sea waves. There’s nothing like my Yiayia, putting me to bed with Greek stories. There’s nothing like the sun in winter, the will of the people when they put their mind to something, the endless library of art and history and mythology. Panigiria, rakomela—the simplicity.

“Greece eats her own children,” says my mum, like it’s a universal truth that will never change. But it has to and we won’t stop until it does.