A deadly collision between two trains occurred a few seconds later between the stations of Doxaras, 30 kilometers from Larissa, and Sirota Karditsa. The Acropolis Express departing from Germany collided head-on with train No. 121, following the Athens-Thessaloniki route.

Katerina, riding in the second, became one with the shackles. “My legs were all in shackles. The soldier told me not to worry and helped me out,” she describes, her voice still trembling. Her whole body ached and she was cold. The man saw her and threw a cloak over her to keep warm. Then she heard her fiancee calling her name. He approached her and saw that the woman had lost one leg. “He bled constantly. He told me: “I’m cold, take care of the children.” Upon hearing the news, her brother hurried to take his wife and sister. Mrs. Triantafillou says she took her fiancée’s pulse for a while. The women went to the hospital and many days later informed the 22-year-old that her brother’s wife had died.

Ms. Triantafillou was hospitalized in critical condition in Larissa and then for six months in CAT. She had broken bones all over her body. In the hospital, away from her family, in endless hours of loneliness, the images she saw when she managed to get out of the third car in which she was sitting constantly appeared in her memory. “When I came out, I saw people slaughtered like lambs, dismembered. It was a decapitated child,” he describes, conveying how he saw it. According to official figures, 19 people died and 48 were injured as a result of the conflict. To this day, the old woman refuses to believe it and complains that the death toll from that fatal accident should have been much higher.

“Cars and people have become coal”, “There is no official report on the causes of the tragedy.” These were two of the headlines that were written about the crash. Although the conflict has taken over the newspapers, without the media that exists today, it would not have taken on the magnitude it deserved.

Memories awaken

When the woman turned on the TV on Wednesday morning, she couldn’t believe her eyes. To freeze. He describes how he couldn’t even cry.

“I was shaking. I couldn’t speak. My legs shook with fear. Because of fear. I lie down and have nightmares,” he said, saying that all the memories have awakened.

Mrs. Triantafillou could not believe the images of burnt and crushed wagons she saw, images and stories similar to her own. “Is it possible to do such things now? Again? – he asked.

Documentary about Doxaras

“Tragic irony. That’s how I felt,” Vangelis Pirpilis, a member of the film crew that created the Doxaras documentary about the history of the 1972 accident that marked Tempi, told K.. “We did not expect this to happen again. Now we believe that we are not in danger of such an accident, that the necessary systems have been installed. Then there was another line. A conflict on a double line?” he said.

In the case of Doxaras, the stationmaster, who realized that a collision was about to happen, with no wireless capability, tried to find a taxi to catch the train and signal the driver.. He never succeeded, and therefore the fatal accident could not be avoided. At the end of the film, it is mentioned that the accident was the reason for the installation of cordless phones in all cars.

If telephones already existed, Doxaras would not have been a tragedy. If, experts say, remote control worked, so many lives would not be lost in evangelism. History repeats itself.

To this day, Katerina Triantafillou is happy to have survived that fateful encounter. She often wishes that her daughter-in-law would also be saved. The invisible victims of this conflict were her orphaned nieces and her brother, who had been widowed so early. She herself got engaged a year after the accident, and then got married and started a family. She managed to move on, smile again and live with her children and grandchildren. But the accident left her with unhealed physical and mental wounds. She still has iron scars on her legs and arms, and she still has a slight disability in her arm. “I have never worn a crop top. I was ashamed of my wounds.” Psychic signs are just as persistent. According to him, every time there is an explosion or the phone rings, he shakes.

In her case, the stationmaster was convicted. But nothing, she says, could appease her anger at what happened, at the shortcomings that happened then and are tragically happening today, 51 years later.

And what he still hasn’t found an answer to is the “why”. Why did she lose her fiancee? Why did she and her family suffer, but also why now so many people have died and so many other families are suffering? Why did a simple train ticket become a death ticket?