Greece’s dark past is uncovered after 33 bodies are found in a civil war-era mass grave

THESSALONIKI, Greece (AP) — Workers were installing benches at a park in the ancient Greek port city of Thessaloniki when their excavator pushed brown soil off a fragile white skull.

They turned off the motorized equipment and set to work with pickaxes and shovels. The crew found two skeletons, then more. By March, 33 sets of bones lay in a tight cluster of unmarked burial pits in the shadow of a Byzantine fortress.

“We found many bullets in the heads, the skulls,” supervising engineer Haris Charismiadis said, standing on earth overturned by four months of digging.

It’s common to find ancient remains or objects in Greece. But hulking Yedi Kule castle was a prison where Communist sympathizers were tortured and executed during Greece’s 1946–49 Civil War. Tens of thousands died in the early Cold War-era battles between Western-backed government forces and left-wing insurgents, a brutal conflict with assassination squads, child abductions and mass displacements.

Greece’s archaeological service cleared the site for development because the bones are less than 100 years old. But authorities in Neapolis-Sykies, a suburb of the coastal city of Thessaloniki, pressed on with excavation, saying the chance find has “great historical and national importance.”

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