Autumn 1941, in the village of Kormista in the prefecture of Serres.
At dawn on the first day of October, a Bulgarian detachment with Nazi collaborators from Drama, after fraudulently rounding up villagers, separated the men from the women and children and, holding the latter hostage, led about 125 men to the basement of the Community Shop. There they murdered 91 residents of Kormista of age between 16 and 70.
The show “Forgotten Villages” brings to light the unknown massacre that took place in Greece at the beginning of the war by the Bulgarian occupation forces, under the instructions of the Nazi leadership. The inhabitants of the martyred Kormista found themselves unprepared in the face of an unspeakable massacre, unable to react and without the survivors ever being able to explain why their own people were victims of this tragedy.
The Civil War, the flight to the so-called” eastern countries’ and the feeling of being foreign and away from home, lead after the war to Kormista becoming a deserted village, once drenched with the blood of its own people.
The episode will be broadcast for the first time by Voice of Greece on Friday, February 2nd, 2024.
Research/Documentation/Presentation: Thomas Sideris
Small villages perched on the roots of rocks, but also head villages and towns that were full of life and became places of martyrdom and death during the fascist and Nazi era.
People caught in the maelstrom of history, unable to define their present and future, who lived through the horror and absurdity of war. Those who managed to survive, orphans and happy parents, relatives of the thousands of victims, lived the rest of their lives in an endless silence.
Thomas Sideris opens the precious archive of the show “Unguarded Passage” and through his years of research he brings to light older and newer oral testimonies and narratives, which communicate with each other composing a dense canvas of parallel narrative axes about the massacres and holocausts that took place throughout Greece during World War II.
From the martyrdom of Distomo, Kalavryta, Mousiotitsa and Kommeno, to Viano, Anogia, Mesovouni and Domeniko, the “Forgotten villages” come alive again through the oblivion of time and tell us about all these and about all those who must never be forgotten.