The twins would be 30 years old today, Vassilis would be 40, Spyros a breath before 50 and the Commander 64 years old.
But time stood still for all 13 of them on that morning of July 11, 2011.
In Mari.
It was Monday then, just like today.
At that dawn the earth shook. The explosion at the Naval Base "Evangelos Florakis" was even recorded by seismographs. The base and the Vasilikos power station were flattened. Cyprus was plunged into darkness. It took hours to realize what had happened.
The earth shook
The realization of the magnitude of the disaster came later...
The first information after the explosion was scarce. No one imagined the disaster. Only when we began to count the dead... When the smoke and dust settled it was found that 12 people had perished and 60 others were injured. A few days later another one.
13 dead.
The greatest peacetime disaster in Cyprus.
The shock did not stop there. The revelation that some people knew and stood idly by "waiting" for the tragedy came as a shock. And outrage.
Photographs released, taken just 24 hours before the explosion, showed the containers tampered with, while some "danced" on them to prove that there was supposedly no danger. The orders were: "Sprinkle them with water to drop the temperature". When an ignition was observed in the early morning hours of 11 July 2011, instead of ordering an evacuation of the base, the fire brigade was called in to extinguish it. At 4:00 in the morning and while several people were on site, the containers exploded.
The explosion in the 96 containers stored at the Naval Base, evidence of a state in decay. Stacked overseas since 2009, when they were seized on a Russian-owned ship carrying them from Iran to Syria in violation of the UN embargo. The uncovered documents show that the government of then President Demetris Christofias had given assurances to the Assad regime that it would not destroy the cargo and would somehow deliver it at a later stage. The then Defence Minister Costas Papakostas was assured that the shipment was harmless and could even be placed in the yard of his house. Every attempt to destroy the explosives and remove it from Cyprus ran into various problems.
Until the tragedy...
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