It was performed today at I.N. The Memorial of the late Iakovos Koumis, a victim of the cowardly state violence of the MAT during a demonstration for the Polytechnic in Athens in 1980, in which Iakovos was a mere spectator.
The memorial service was performed by the family, his classmates from the Technical School of Famagusta and the Municipality of Sotiras. After the memorial service, a trisagion was performed and then relatives and friends of Iakovos symbolically posted his photo at the Municipal Palace of the Savior. A memorial speech was delivered by the teacher Panagiotis Liasidis, a classmate of the deceased.
Who was Iakovos Koumis?
He was born in 1956 to Giannis and Eleni Koumi in Sotira, Famagusta. He graduated from the Technical School of Famagusta and after his military service he worked at the Oil Refinery in Larnaca, while at the same time he graduated from the Night High School in order to get a diploma and go to the Law School of the University of Athens.
An anxious spirit, as his friends described him, with great involvement in the public and a deeply politicized and thinking man.
Shortly before going to Greece, in 1980 he married Maria Kaikki, also from Sotira. In the same year, he enrolled in the Political Department of the University of Athens.
He finally settled in Athens with his wife, in an apartment in Sepolia.
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 with participating in the process," his first ", as he put it in Pavlos, is typical", continues L. Axelos.
"When the arrival of all of us was over, we started towards the American embassy. But the events took on explosive proportions. Having been cut off from the rest, we found ourselves in the Propylaea, our comrade Giannis Kargiotis, Iakovos and I, relatively far from the center of the conflicts in Syntagma and Vasilissis Sofias and given that Iakovos was essentially ignorant, not only of Athens but also of police violence, we deemed it appropriate to disband and return to our homes.
It was 10 to 10:15 at night when we broke up. Alas. It was forever… Late at night I was notified that Iakovos had been killed by the MAT in Syntagma ". To this day, no one knows why Iakovos Koumis decided not to return directly to his home that fateful night. He headed to Syntagma Square and there, sitting in a chair, he was killed in the back by the MAT, with a key stroke of the brain, as the Italian medical examiner Durande wrote.
According to eyewitness accounts, including his good friend Lefteris Rizas, a member of the "Notebooks", the young student had not lost consciousness completely. During the transport to the hospital by ambulance, although he was literally bathed in blood, he managed to say: "They do not have their God, they ate me". He arrived at the People's Hospital clinically dead. One week later, on November 23, Iakovos Koumis passed away…
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