National Defense Minister Nikos Dendias attended a ceremony on Tuesday for the repatriation from the Cyprus Republic of the remains of six Greek soldiers who died during the Turkish invasion of Cyprus in 1974.
The arrival of the identified remains was welcomed by a guard of honor at the Elefsina Air Force base and a memorial prayer service was held.
“Today Greece is fulfilling a historical duty and does what is self-evident. It pays due honor to the dead and justice to their families. After decades of expectation, it is repatriating the remains of six soldiers from Greece who died heroically during the Turkish invasion of Cyprus in 1974. It is bringing back, in other words, its dead to their homeland,” Dendias underlined at the start of his address.
Dendias noted that this duty entailed an eons-long tradition of Hellenism to collect, pay honor to, and respect its dead. “For the last five decades, the search for and identification of those missing on Cyprus has not stopped. The were and continue to be a national priority.”
The minister thanked all those who worked to make the repatriation possible and said “the search will continue uninterrupted for every missing Greek, and the state will persist until every family receives the justice it is due.” He then noted that all six individuals whose remains were repatriated were soldiers who enlisted from the ranks of citizens and followed a long tradition.
“At every moment of crisis, Greek citizens transcend themselves and the inherent failings of the race, and they unite around the idea of defending their homeland and of the individual, even sacrificial, obligation of each citizen before it.” This is what the great Armed Forces reform known was ‘Agenda 2030’ is based on, he added – creating the strongest, best trained, and best equipped citizen army in Europe.
Dendias named the soldiers, all warrant officers in the reserves, as follows (Greek alphabetical order): Themistoklis Eleftheropoulos, Stefanos Koutroulis, Lambros Nikitopoulos, Theodoros Xenos, Georgios Roussis, and Theodoros Charalambidis. Their names, he said, would be recorded in the Ark of National Remembrance monument at the National Defense Ministry.
The ceremony was attended by Deputy Nina Kassimati as representative of the Greek Parliament, the leaders of the Armed Forces, the Cyprus Republic’s ambassador in Athens, the president of the committee of relatives of missing of the Cyprus tragedy and members of the dead soldiers’ families.
The remains will be buried at the fallen soldiers’ home towns.
