A 94-year-old girl who had lived the 1956 killer… When the island was badly damaged. Similar situations live and now the elderly woman because of the constant earthquakes in Santorini and forced her to leave the island. CORVERSE It was July 9, 1956, shortly after 5am, when the 25-year-old Flora Karamolegos, who lived with her family in Santorini, heard a “strong bang, like thunder” shaking the house where they lived in Mesa Gonia. Those minutes that followed, even now, when she was 94 years old, she remembers them like yesterday. Waiting at the port, in the bay of Athens, to leave for Piraeus, as for days the seismic vibrations between Santorini and Amorgos have been consecutive, recounts those terrifying minutes of 1956, comparing them with what lives today. “The earthquake at the time was abrupt, like thunder. Now it is the opposite, first the small ones and then we wait for the big one,” says Mrs Karamolegos at the Athens-Macedonian News Agency, stressing that what concerns them is that they do not know how big this earthquake will be. Holding her cane, wearing a handkerchief on her head, and having her son, George, remembers the deafening bang and what followed, after the 7.5-point earthquake of the Richter scale, according to the records then, to level Santorini and leave behind 53 dead, hundreds injured and wreckage. TRANSPARENCY “Pushing on a wreck” “I was with my father and my sister’s children at home when a loud crash sounded like thunder. Then my dad yelled at me “take the children and go out”. One was two years old and was in the crib while the other was on the couch with his grandfather, my father. I grab one kid from the crib while the other got up on the couch with Grandpa and went to the dining room. “Come here,” I say, “to sit near me”, “no, I will be with Grandpa”, she said. That’s when my dad opened the dining room door and threw the kid out, and he was coming in to get me out of one bedroom so I could go to the second room and get out of the house. I was stepping on a score, ” he relates. Above the house, as he says, there was a warehouse “upper called it, it was like a small house,” he says. “This pierced the bedroom, the second, while I held the child in arms and went out. My dad grabbed the kid out of my hands and was trying to open the dining room door to get out but he couldn’t. Then he found a handkerchief so he could open and hold the door. I arrived and came out of one bedroom to another and then into the dining room,” he points out. At the time of the first earthquake, as she recounts, she struck her leg and then looked for a relative who was close to give her first aid. “I think about all this, can 7 come? Can anything else come?” “I had struck my foot, limped inside the house, went to one of our colleagues downstairs and say ‘Uncle, do me a friction’, and my eyes were blurry. I made sense to her and lie on the couch and then scream out,” she says and adds that at that moment it was the second earthquake that occurred. “Then we entered a field. It was abrupt that the houses fell. Now it’s the opposite. I think of all this, can 7 come?Is there anything else coming?” he asks. As she argues, Mesa Gonia, their own village, was deemed inappropriate. “Many houses had fallen and took it out of the village inappropriate, and they went and built on a mountain of Agios Pagkratios, because it was the day of Agios Pagratios that the earthquake took place and it was celebrated by all Santorini,” he explains. Born Santorinia, in 1960 she left for Athens, married and when her husband retired she returned to Santorini, Kamari. Yesterday, waiting in the passenger waiting room to get on board, he wondered: “Can I, old woman, my child, sit here without sleeping, not knowing how long this will go on? How to sleep. It doesn’t… I say yesterday of my son “You fall and I will wake you if anything happens”. “This has never happened before. I didn’t sleep yesterday,” George adds. Shortly after 16:00 yesterday, Tuesday, February 4, Mrs Karamolegos ascended the ship to Piraeus in order to stay at her home in Athens for at least 15 days, she said.
Santorini: “The earthquake was steep, like thunder” – The memories of 94 years old since the 1956 killing vibration
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