Only an unusual story from greek chronicle….

During the end of ’80s, the south side of Greece was a discreet livable zone, where crime and mob were almost completely absent, probably due to the poverty of people but not only. Very few people lived far from the Parthenon in a vast territory, an aspect that has allowed, in ancient times, an equitable distribution of resources among the inhabitants. The local currency of the time, the Dracma, was absolutely unusable in the other countries due to the unfavorable change, but allowed the inhabitants a decent standard of living. For example, one kilo of bread cost, in 2001, 160 drachmas, the equivalent of 0,47 euro. But in this zone, was happened an event with the darker colors of the deep waters of the Ionian Sea. The facts and locations described are absolutely real, and a greek man told this story our collaborator Anya and her teammate, during an away game on the south of Greece.

It was curious how the man told this to both German girls…and casually, the two protagonists of this story are two German citizens who went on holiday in Finikounda, a small town in the Peloponnese, between the two Venetian castles of Koroni and Methoni, known as “the Eyes of Venice”, a historical site of exceptional importance for the Mediterranean, because it was on the route from Constantinople (today’s Istanbul) to Venice. The villages were simple but livable, and the local inhabitants were differents of german people, so the two spouses decided not to return to Germany, perhaps to improve their standard of living, or perhaps for some unknown fact of their past. The woman was nice and very kind, she found immediately a job as a cleaning lady in a small hotel in the center of Finikounda, and work was different from the exhausting German times. A piece of fresh bread was always on the table set up by the matron of the family. Its integration was also favored by a fluent Greek, learned quickly and just as quickly she became the “iermanida”, German, most beloved of the community. The man instead did not have the same work fortune, but with good will he dedicated himself to small manual works that allowed the couple to live a simple but honest life. They lived in Kamaria, a small village with four houses near the mountains, in a little house with only a few bricks fixed years ago with lime, a thatched roof and a chimney. But the man was not completely satisfied, and doing small jobs for a few hundred drachmas for day was not his ambition. The desire to leave in search of fortune was always stronger, and envied his wife who found a new life and was completely happy. In 1990 he left the country permanently.
The years passed, the woman lived and worked in the hotel, alternating the work of a cleaning woman with that of baby-sitter for the children of the owners. After leaving her husband, she left the house in Kamaria, for lived permanently in the hotel. After some time the woman accuses the first health problems, the hospital of Kalamata was far away and poorly equipped, and the woman died in 1998 at 55, leaving a wonderful memory but also many questions about her past life.

Some time later, the owners of the hotel, as an aquired family members, went to the house that had been of the couple to put the woman’s assets in order, but also to find, perhaps, some valuables or some clues on her past life. The inside of the house was poor and inside there was only a large trunk at the foot of the bed. Inside the trunk there was not just some old blankets or some dress, but the decaying corpse of her husband, with a photo and the name written on a piece of paper. The woman had kept the body of the man inside the trunk for more than 8 years! They were alerted local authorities but they no checks on the man’s body was not held to make sure it was really him. The advanced state of decomposition associated with the piece of paper and the photograph that had left the woman was more than enough to identify the identity as certain. The woman had killed her husband when he had decided to go abroad. Then, she went to live in the Finikounda’s hotel to forget about the murder. Probably Angela knew that someone sooner or later would go to the house, and had wanted to leave her last message to the people who had opened the trunk.
The Greek man who told the our girls this story, concluded by saying that there are still many hypotheses about these events: for example there was no murder, and the man could also died for natural causes, and the woman he would hide it for fear of being accused of murder. Or someone else might have put a trunk with a corpse inside the woman’s home, which had been empty for a long time, and would have taken a photograph from inside the house. A little less likely, but however one of the hypotheses. These and other questions will remain forever a mystery, which she has brought, inexorably, with her to the grave.