This is what happened on April 25, 1944. The partisans of ELAS (Greek People's Liberation Army), the largest Resistance organization in Greece, had managed to capture 17 German officers on this very road that connects Livadia with the village of Distomo - the site of one of the most heinous Nazi crimes in the country, which was to take place a month and a half later.
The ELAS men wrote a letter to the German headquarters in Livadia demanding the release of 32 Greek prisoners, but the Nazi response turned to bite them back: within a few hours, the Nazis transported 136 Greek prisoners to Karakolithos, and executed them on the spot.
It took half a century, perhaps because of the wounds left by the Greek Civil War that followed immediately after the end of WW2, for a monument to be erected for the remembrance of the unjustly executed Greek patriots of that day, in the area of Karakolithos (Black Stone, in Greek) .
By the mid-1990s, the Prefecture of Viotia announced a tender for the construction of the monument. The work was commissioned to the sculptor Angelika Korovesi, and the result justified her choice: she created this imposing monument of brass and marble, and erected it in Karakolithos in 1997.
In the monument’s lower section, the metal bodies of the male figures, pierced by bullets, as well as the numb pain they exude, symbolize the foundation on which the Greek Resistance stepped and grew.
At the top of the monument, the bronze figures of the guerrillas, fighting and fearless against any kind of trespasser of freedom, seem to emerge from the ravines of the mountains. And they are fitted with a technique that allows them to vibrate with the gust of wind.
Angelika Korovesi, at the same time, designed the monument in harmony with the landscape; she gave it the shape and direction of the hill Karakolithos, which is located opposite of the monument. On the monument's south side, the names of all those executed are displayed, one by one.
On the other side, a poem of the old partisan signing as D.N.D. reads: "As you primal fighters were crossing the Roumeli forests, your footsteps were heard by the heroes of our Centuries, and they rejoiced in their sacred graves, that the brave Greeks came again."
.jpeg?auto=webp)
.jpeg?auto=webp)
.jpeg?auto=webp)
.jpeg?auto=webp)
.jpeg?auto=webp)
.jpeg?auto=webp)
.jpeg?auto=webp)
.jpeg?auto=webp)
/1x.jpeg?auto=webp)
/1x.jpeg?auto=webp)
/1x.jpeg?auto=webp)
/1x.jpeg?auto=webp)
/1x.jpeg?auto=webp)
/1x.jpeg?auto=webp)