Kalavryta

We entered the town of Kalavryta after a drive of several hours through the mountains. The roads had to be driven with caution, as they snaked their way up, down and around the steep slopes. We passed dozens of roadside memorials, mute evidence of the danger in taking the highway too lightly.

We felt that it was important to go there. Kalavryta was the site of a horrible massacre ordered by the Nazis during World War II. There had been partisan activity in the mountains around the town, a unit of 80 German soldiers had been captured by the partisans and some had been killed in that action. The partisans had started negotiations to exchange the prisoners On December 13, 1943, the Nazis took revenge for this on the civilian inhabitants of the town. Every man and boy over the age of 15 years was taken to a hillside outside the town and shot dead. The total number killed in the region was 1436. The women and children were locked in the local schoolhouse and it was set on fire, as was the rest of the town. The women and children managed to escape the fire, but they could do nothing after they escaped but bury the dead, digging with sticks and their bare hands in the frozen earth.

The school house has been rebuilt, and it has been turned into a museum that relays a history of these horrific events in a dignified and even understated manner. Video recordings of survivors tell their personal memories of this atrocity. Especially moving was a wall of the museum that is covered with hundreds of photos of the boys and men who died that day.

Kalavryta today is a lovely town set among snow-capped mountains. There is skiing in the area, so tourists and Greek skiers are in town all winter. But all Greeks live in the middle of their history, and this is certainly no truer anywhere than in Kalavryta. In many tavernas and shops, there are paintings that commemorate this massacre. The hands of the old cathedral clock in the main square are stopped at 2:34, the time that the shooting began. On the road out of town, a memorial and a large white cross stand on that fatal hillside, a stark and poignant reminder of the mass murder that was committed there. With white stones the following messages are spelled out in large letters at the base of the hill "OXI STOPOLEMO" (No to war) and "EIPINH" (Peace). We hope this message resonates with the thousands of people who pass the memorial, as it certainly did with us.