“Customers at the hair salon were holding the book to learn the story,” says the 55-year-old hairdresser.
The bell rings and 66-year-old Vassilis Tsimas crosses the threshold of the school, to participate in the national exams. Some people look at him strangely, they may think he is a teacher and others with admiration when they learn that he is also a candidate. However, he does not pay attention as his mind is focused on Ancient Greek, the subject in which he is competing today and which he hopes will bring him closer to his goal of passing to the Gymnastics Academy!
“I always missed something … All the years I was working I did not feel well. “From a very young age I went out to fight, I had to work to support myself and when at the age of 58 I recovered professionally and financially, I decided to finish school and now I am taking national exams”, he explains, speaking to the Athenian / Macedonian News Agency.
As he says, his greatest joy was that he started the first high school with his granddaughter. “For me, the happy fact was that I was with my granddaughter from the first year of high school. We had competition with each other and finally finished together. In fact, I managed to pass it in the degree of graduation “, he says jokingly, with a wide smile of a small child forming on his face.
The journey was not easy as while working as a martial arts teacher and sports merchant, he had to read systematically to achieve his goal. Despite the difficulties, however, he did not think for a moment to give them up and managed to finish high school and lyceum, at the 1st Evening School of Thessaloniki.
“Customers at the hair salon were holding the book to learn the story”
With the same stubbornness and the same love for knowledge, the 55-year-old hairdresser Christos Stangos, decided at an old age to change his life and give himself a second chance.
“It was a big thorn for me that for so many years I had not been able to realize my dream. “Every year I said that I would start school and the job, the obligations, everything, would not let me do it”, he states, pointing out that he stopped school when he lost his family and had to work for a living.
Every minute, every moment on this trip, as Mr. Stangos notes, he enjoyed it with all his soul and had the support of his friends, but also of his clients, in the hair salon he has maintained for three decades. “I served in the field of beauty, but I always wanted to study. It was a very difficult effort, I read 4-5 hours a night, to fill in the blanks. “I read everywhere, even in the hair salon … My clients helped me, they kept the book and I told them the story, they supported me as if it were my family”, he says excitedly.
Referring to the reactions of the other candidates who participate in the Panhellenic exams, when they see him among them, laughing, he points out that: “When I enter the room, they think I am a professor and even ask me:” Professor, what will we write? “. It is beautiful and then when I tell them I am “and I with you, I am a student and I will take exams”, it seems very strange to them, but they like it “, he explains, with eyes that testify to his joy and satisfaction.
Christos Stangos’s goal is to be able to move to the Department of Pastoral and Social Theology, of the Theological School of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, as he pointed out in APE-MPE, from a very young age he was very close to God and the Church and was the promise he had give to his mother when he lost her at the age of 13.
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