First came the mourning, then the handover of loved ones, then the funerals. On Friday it was Athina Katsara, the young mother of a toddler, carried in a white coffin out of Katerini’s church in the first funeral of the first “angel” to meet death in Greece’s worst ever train crash.
On Saturday it was Iphigenia Mitska, like so many of the disaster’s 57 victims in her early 20s, to whom family and friends bade farewell. She, too, was buried in a sealed white coffin in northern Giannitsa. And then it will be others – all identified through DNA samples provided by relatives – who will be laid to rest at the end of a three-day official mourning period for the nation but only the start of profound sadness for the families involved.
