Kind, tender, comfortable, a little naive, definitely the grandmother we would all like to have. The "grandmother Sofia" in the legendary -now Mega series- it Penthouse was one of the favorite characters of the series of Giannis Dalianidis. And so Koula Agagiotou was a beloved and good person, but very tortured in her personal life as well.
Η actress with her magnificent and stately appearance for many years she carried her own heavy cross. And she ascended her Golgotha with stoicism, discretion and dignity. Without leaving room for others to give her a different look, especially that of sadness. And perhaps this is due to the fact that her death in 2006 became known months later.
Koula Agagiotou's sister got Dimitris Zagkas from her marriage, but divorced while the child was still a baby. The mother was locked up in a psychiatric hospital and the child grew up with the actress his aunt, but also his grandmother.
The actress loved him very much and raised him as her own child, trying not to spoil him. But the child growing up showed strange signs in his behavior. He left school in the first years of high school because, as he said, his classmates made fun of him because he did not say "r".
He was a fanatical admirer of Jack the Ripper and the Roman emperor Caligula. He spent endless hours in cinemas watching crime movies. Whenever he saw a funeral in the street, he followed the procession and waited to see the burial of the dead.
He left his house alone at night and often slept in cemeteries and painted his teeth red to look like another of his idols, Dracula. At the age of 16, he was hospitalized for five months in a psychiatric clinic, where he tried to commit suicide, while he had repeatedly attacked his relatives and couples in Lycabettus without, however, ever making any official complaint to the authorities.
The actress' nephew soon expressed a "desire" to commit crimes against women, aiming - as he had confessed - to kill as many women as he could. And then to kill himself in a fight.
As he explained, he hated women because they rejected him. In fact, he claimed that at the age of 16 he was abandoned by the girl he loved, due to the sexual impotence caused to him by an operation he underwent when he was 13 years old, because he suffered from hypospadias.
In addition, he hated his mother for giving birth to him ugly, believing that he was worse than Quasimodo and everyone hated him for it. But he also hated his aunt, because he handed him over to the police but also because he did not give him the money he needed to have plastic surgery to look like Don Juan.
It was at midnight on April 23, 1964 when a woman, Maria Bavea, was found dead at the intersection of V. Georgiou and Pratinou streets in Pagrati. Passers-by saw the young woman covered in blood in the middle of the street and alerted the police. No significant evidence was found at the crime scene.
The police authorities started the investigations but in the following days - and after exhausting all possibilities - they found themselves at a dead end.
But everything changed when on May 13, 1964, a knife carrying traces of human blood arrived in the hands of the police. They soon found themselves in the solution of the mystery and in the murderer of the girl. And he was none other than Dimitris Zagkas, nephew of the actress Koula Agagiotou, who confessed to the crime.
According to his confession, he stabbed her in the back without saying a word to her and then went to his house, where he ate and slept.
Koula Agagiotou, a few days after the murder, returned to her home from Thessaloniki, where she appeared in the troupe of Smaroula Giouli. She asked her nephew if he had a pistol and he told her about the knife. He asked for it, took it and immediately the actress handed it to a friend of the florist to throw it away.
When the actress was informed by her cousin about his blood-stained shirt that he had washed, she combined all the facts and understood what exactly was happening. She took the knife behind the florist and handed it to a lawyer, expressing suspicions that her nephew was a murderer. The lawyer in turn handed it over to the police who arrested the young man.
The story took on enormous proportions - as expected - while the eyes of the public turned to the trial, where the actress, among other things, explained how much she loved her nephew, whom she raised and tried not to hurt him.
"Why not do all the nods to him, since he was sick and I was afraid of his end? Why not deprive myself of everything for his sake? " had testified among other things.
Eventually, the court ruled that "the accused was incurably insane and dangerous." Although convicted of the murder, he was found to have complete confusion and ordered to be admitted to a psychiatric clinic. And this is how the epilogue of Agagiotou's blood-stained family history was written, which he always carried within her.
The actress was respected by all her colleagues and had something to say about her whole character. She may not have been a protagonist, but her talent was great and made her stand out. From the series - stations in her career was the "Border Station" and means "Penthouse".
In the first years of private television, Dalianidis' series aired on Mega "air" and in it Agagioti plays Sofia Sofianou, mother of the neurotic Katerina (Katerina Gioulaki). Her sweet character and the fact that she did what her granddaughter (Josh Eweidi) wanted her to do made her dear to the TV audience.
The series has been shown and continues to be shown in repetition and its character is hard to forget. However, it seems that she was forgotten, since like other colleagues she had a lonely death. As lonely he was the death of her co-star in the series, Vicky Vanita.
Koula Agagiotou passed away on October 25, 2006. She died at her home in Koukaki, while her death became known months later.