Iakovos Koumis: 42 years since the cowardly murder of the student from Sotira

It was the evening of Sunday, November 16, 1960. Iakovos Koumis is lying covered in blood under a chair in a cafe in the Syntagma area. A little earlier, MAT men brutally hit him on the head, murdering him, while he was sitting unsuspecting and watching from a distance the march for the Polytechnic uprising. He was 24 years old. A few months before, he had married his beloved Maria Koumis, with whom they left Sotira Famagusta and arrived together in Athens to study and make their dreams come true. But death separated them. An unjust and cowardly death that has not been justified to this day. He found no justification neither from the Greek nor from the Cypriot state.

Iakovos Koumis breathed his last a few days later on November 23, 1980. The Italian medical examiner Durante described the cause of death as a blunt force trauma to the brain. That year, Ralli's government had forbidden the march to reach the American embassy and forced the demonstrators to disperse in accordance with the Constitution. When part of the march tried to reach the embassy, ​​the police attacked the demonstrators with unprecedented violence. On the same day as Iakovos Koumis, the 20-year-old worker Stamatina Kanellopoulou was also murdered by being hit with a globe, while the police suppression of the march also left several injured. The families of the dead filed lawsuits but none of their killers were ever found.

In the debate about the events in parliament, the majority of politicians blamed the protesters, and went into technical details about police maneuvers (where and how the police should have hit the protesters), with few exceptions condemning the police violence, like Zigdis. The prime minister at the time, George Rallis, said: "And the Archangel Michael holds a sword in his hands to defend himself against the demons. It doesn't hold flowers."

Iakovos Koumis

Iakovos, son of Yiannis and Eleni Koumis, came from a farming family of Sotiras Famagusta. He was a student of the Technical School and after graduation, he served his military service. He found a job at the Larnaca Oil Refinery and at the same time attended night High School in order to be able to pass to the Athens Law School. From 1978 he was a member of the political group "Pargas", and participated in the publication of the first issue of the "Tetradia" magazine. Before starting his studies in Greece and a few months before his death, in 1980 he married Maria Kaikki.

According to Loukas Axelos, "it is obvious that the above (work, army, technical school, night) prolonged the cycle of his student studies by a few years, as a result of which he enrolled in the university at the age of 24, when the rest of his peers normally graduated. Koumis lived through the Turkish invasion. His reaction was immediate, participating in the anti-occupation mobilizations, while at the same time he actively activated the Self-Determination Committee of Cyprus. Later, he joined the left-patriotic circle that created Ta Octovriana, the first left-wing, radical and patriotic bookstore in Cyprus. In 1978 he joined and participated in the political group Labor, with which they published the first issue of the magazine "Tetradia", which was dedicated to the Cyprus issue. Shortly before he came to Greece, in 1980 he married his fellow resident Maria Kaikki. And in the same year, he is enrolled in the Political Department of the University of Athens. He finally settled in Athens with his wife, in an apartment in Sepolia. His involvement with student events was immediate. From the first moment he approaches them and comments critically on them in his Political Diary. Indicatively, two days before his murder, he wrote: "The Greek student movement suffers from a sick politicization. Poorly digested ideas are expressed in many words without substance. That's the first impression I had""

The Municipality of Sotiras honored Iakovos Koumis

With a modest and at the same time great event and with the hall of the Municipal Building literally full, the Municipality of Sotiras honored on Tuesday, November 20, 2012, Iakovos Koumis, victim of the cowardly violence of the MAT during the Polytechnic demonstration on November 16, 1980.

The most moving moment of the event was the opening as it was shown for the first time after so many years, audio-visual material from the 1973 RIK show "Traditional Dances", during which Iakovos Koumis himself was shown dancing with the dance group of the Technical School Famagusta, which participated in every weekly show.

Then poems and texts from Koumi's personal diary were read, which reveal a man of intellect, with a richness of speech and with full ideological and political awareness. The fact that members of Iakovos's family (children of his two brothers, Andrea and Antonis) participated in the event caused emotion, while Psakovos A. Koumi, who took the name of the late Iakovos, read his written texts from his diaries and his CV.

The Associate Professor of Contemporary Greek History at the University of Cyprus, Mr. Petros Papapoliviou, and the journalist Lazaros Mavros spoke about Iakovos, sharing experiences and facts.

Then songs from the Sotiras Municipal Orchestra were heard while out of the program the musician Loukas Zymaras, a friend of Koumi, read some of his unknown poems and sang a song he had written a year before his death.

In the end, posthumous plaques were awarded by the Municipality of Sotiras to his father, Giannis Koumis and his wife Maria Kaikki Koumis, while the Reserve Paratroopers awarded plaques to his father, Giannis Koumis.

Outside the Municipal Hall, the family of Iakovos Koumis received the attendees as a sign of remembrance for the late Iakovos.

The event is available in audiovisual material which can be obtained by contacting the City Hall of Sotira.

Lucas Axelos describes:

During the short period of its establishment in Athens, we met through the project of "Notebooks". "We caught up and made an excursion to Nea Makri, when a week before he was murdered together with our friend Pavlos Hatzipavlou and our wives, Angela, Daphne and Maria, walking around the oranges and lemons of my paternal estate," recalls the magazine's director. Together with other comrades we lived that year on the three days of the anniversary of the Polytechnic, at the "table" of the "Notebooks" and the "Work".

On Sunday, November 16, we went down early to the Polytechnic to participate in the march, as it happened. "Iakovos' obsession for participation in the process is characteristic," his first ", as he put it in Pavlos", continues L. Axelos. "When the arrival of all of us was over, we started towards the American embassy.

But the events took explosive proportions. Having been cut off from the rest, we found ourselves in the Propylaia, our comrade Giannis Kargiotis, Iakovos and I, relatively far from the center of conflict in Syntagma and Vasilissis Sophia, and given that Iakovos was essentially ignorant, not only of Athens but of police brutality, we decided it was appropriate to disband and return to our homes.

It was 10 to 10:15 at night when we parted. Alas. It was forever... Late at night I was notified that Iakovos had been murdered by the MAT in Syntagma." No one to this day knows why Iakovos Koumis decided not to return directly to his home that fateful night. He headed to Syntagma Square and there, sitting on a chair, he was murdered by the MAT from behind, with a fatal blow to cut off the brain, as the Italian coroner Durante wrote.

According to the descriptions of the eyewitnesses, including his good friend, member of the "Notebooks" Lefteris Rizas, the young student had not completely lost consciousness. While being transported to the hospital by ambulance, although literally bathed in blood, he managed to say: "They don't have their God, they ate me." He arrived at the People's Hospital clinically dead.

One week later, on November 23, Iakovos Koumis breathed his last...

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