The “Bloody Diary” by Achillea Goumas is an authentic account of the Greco-Italian war

The “Bloody Diary” of Achillea Goumas from Grevena Palace, is an authentic account of him Greco-Italian war through the battlefields. In a small pocket notebook, the young Achilles takes notes almost every day, from the military operations, the advance of the Greek army, he writes about the frost and dry weather in the snowy Morava, about the hugs and the triumphant reception that the Greeks reserved for them in on the evening of November 22, 1940 when they entered Koritsa, but also for the “Memorial of the old woman” the mountain peak at a height of 2,000 meters north of Maliq, where on April 5, 1941 he will take his last breath. The small pocket diary up to that moment numbered 64 pages.

When the war broke out, Achilleas Goumas was a fourth-year student at the Law School of the University of Thessaloniki. He was recruited and on October 26 he was in the area of ​​Kastoria with the 1st Battalion of the 53rd Neapolis Kozani Regiment. During the Italian invasion, it defended itself in the area of ​​the Snowy Kastoria and during the counterattack of the Greek army, Achilleas Goumas and his Battalion commanded by Major Nasos Palaiodimopoulos – he also breathed his last in the “Memorial of the old woman” will be the first Greek soldiers who will enter Kortsa.

The young Achilles is perhaps the only case of a soldier who, while fighting on the front line, at the same time his father, Athanasios Goumas, the legendary “grandfather of the Greek-Albanian front” is fighting a few kilometers away from him in the province of Kortsas.

In the “grave of the old woman” the snow was painted red…

Achilleas Goumas with his Battalion, since February 1941 is just a few kilometers outside the town of Maliq, on a mountain top called “Memorial of the Old Woman” where the enemy troops of the Italians are only 500 meters away. As he describes in his diary, the attacks of the Greek side and the counter-attacks with bombardments by the Italians resulted in the snow being dyed red.

“The snow at the “old woman’s grave” reached 3 meters without any exaggeration. Here on February 11 the battle was set to take place. The objective was to capture a high bare mountain called Goritop, 2120 m high. It was characteristic of this battle that none of the officers were left unscathed. The snow was reddened by the blood shed by both our own and the enemy. Major Fakinas is killed… also about 3-4 Second Lieutenants, 4 Second Lieutenants are injured, the rest among them and Lieutenant Zgonis from Rodia Grevenon. All the officers of the Grevena Battalion were killed or wounded except for one captain who showed cowardice and retreated during the battle and thus lost his torso…who should not bear the name of the Greek Officer”.

In this horror of war, young Achilles receives a letter from his sister and learns that his father has enlisted as a volunteer and is somewhere outside Kortsa and that they have two months to hear from him, that his cousin, who was wounded in Grammos, died in a hospital in Athens and another relative is seriously injured. “I hid my great sorrow within myself, but the soldiers felt my sadness and always treated me as if they were my brothers comforting me.”

On March 13, the young Sergeant is informed by the command of the Battalion that his father is wounded in a village just outside of Koritsa and immediately sets out to meet him. “Memory of the Old Woman to the village of Mociani where my father was was about 8 hours. I started at noon, I walked without stopping, the road was full of mud, but where can I count adventures in front of my joy”. Achilleas Goumas will meet his father at the headquarters of Metagos of the Syntagma. “We hugged in the presence of officers of the unit. The next day we arrived in Korytsan so that the doctors could change his wound and leave with a 20-day sick leave for our village”.

Achilleas, during his short stay in Kortsa, feels proud that soldiers and officers show their admiration for his 66-year-old father. “Father and son, we had become objects of admiration in the public of Kortsa. Journalists kept asking us for information so they could publish my father’s actions.”

The hero Achilles, falls dead

The 66-year-old Athanasios Goumas, teacher, father of 4 girls and two boys, is a special subject in the reports of the war correspondents who follow the Greek Army. The newspapers “Acropolis & Kathimerini” have extensive reports even on their front page.

The granddaughter of Thanasis Goumas, Galatea Vassilopoulou, shows us photos from the family archive, where the last meeting between father and son in Kortsa is captured, as well as others with the “grandfather of the front” holding in his hands a snow stick, a spoil of war from the Italian alpinists who died in the Sarantaporos river and in the Pindos mountains.

In the following days, the young Sergeant informs his sister in a letter about everything he lived with his father and tells her that he has been offered a promotion by the Battalion commander. He returns to the “tomb of the old woman” hill and on April 5, 1941 he is mortally wounded by a bomb from an Italian plane. His comrades-in-arms George Kyriakidis from Elaiochori Pangaio and his fellow villagers, Apostolos Vassilopoulos and Achilleas Lolas, after taking care of his burial, will deliver the diary of Achilleas Goumas, which has traces of his blood, to his family.

“…We are convinced by those words”

The extended family of Water Sergeant mourned dead in the Greco-Italian war. Besides Achilleas, his uncle Lazaros Goumas died of frostbite, his cousin Vasilios Goumas was mortally wounded in Morava, Nikolas Goumas was seriously wounded but survived, and his volunteer father Athanasios Goumas was wounded in Trebesina.

Galatea Vassilopoulou tells APE BEE, an unknown aspect of the “bloody diary” of Achilles that the local soldiers handed over to the family. “From the 64-page diary, the first two pages were missing. It seems that they were lost in the midst of the war and during the transport of the seriously injured to the unit doctor. As Mrs. Vassiliadou notes, “around 1972, if I remember correctly, I am at the house of my uncle Sokratis Goumas in Thessaloniki who has bought the magazine “Radiotelevision” which has just been released for the first time. And while he was leafing through it, I suddenly see him losing his color and his senses.” What had happened; Socrates, the penultimate of the 6 children in the family, had just read a magazine article about the war in Albania, where, among other things, it hosted both pages from Achilles’ handwritten diary!

Galatea reports that Socrates, who was a lawyer, immediately contacted the magazine, went to Athens and got the original pages that were missing from the diary. “We managed and pieced together Achilles’ war memories which he captured in a unique way in his little diary that he seems to have always carried with him.” Ms. Vassiliadou assumes that “some soldier found the two handwritten pages, saved them to finally find their way to the public in 1987.” As he claims, what happened with the magazine “Radiotelorasis” was the reason for Sokratis Goumas in 1988 to publish a small book with all the details from Achilles’ bloody diary.

RES-EMP

Read the News today and get the latest news.
Follow Skai.gr on Google News and be the first to know all the news.