Twenty-five years since the day the twin towers came down.
(for the original text in Greek, scroll down)
I was on the morning shift, I remember. A young police cadet on field training at Corfu airport, and we had a few days left before going back to the academy for our final exams and the swearing-in. After two years of training I was about to be posted to Athens as a serving officer.
We hadn’t gone down to the sea for a swim after work that day, as we usually did. We just hung around the room.
We were watching television with my roommate when, early in the afternoon, the channel we were watching interrupted its regular programming and went live to New York. It was around four in the afternoon, Greek time.
Two things shocked me. The moment the second plane came in, all the way until it hit the second tower. And the people who jumped, and whom the camera showed falling for a long time. They fell and they fell… It made you realise how tall those skyscrapers really were.
Until the second impact, we and most of the world thought this was a terrible accident. Somewhere at the back of our minds we knew something was badly wrong with all of it, but neither of us was going to say so out loud. In fact my roommate and I, to break the tension and the dark thoughts we were having, were making jokes about the pilot who couldn’t manage to avoid one of the largest skyscrapers in the world.
And then it happened.
Another plane hits the second tower. Three minutes past four, Greek time.
Shortly afterwards there are reports of a third plane down at the Pentagon. Of a fourth one unaccounted for.
People are jumping into empty air.
It’s coming down! The first tower is coming down like a house of cards. Rubble, dust, people stunned, crying, running in any direction at all.
It’s coming down! How is this possible?
The second tower becomes one with the ground in a matter of seconds. All of it live on air.
We sat there with our mouths open. Motionless and silent, for at least an hour.
And after that, everything changed. We were already in the day after.
Since I was serving at the airport, we understood from the very first moment that nothing would be the same from that day on. Security got somewhat stricter, but mostly what happened was that a few obvious things were finally put in place, things we had always wondered why no one had bothered to do sooner.
The young Brits who had flooded Corfu grumbled at every new instruction. Much as I grumbled to myself a few years later, on a visit to London, when they told me to take off my shoes and my socks, something unheard of until that moment.
Back then we watched the new rules come in without knowing what was behind each of them. Today we know.
What it did to the way we travel: the pocket knives that were perfectly legal, the check that came from a single flight after 9/11, and why the measures are quietly being withdrawn now.
What it did to the map: from Kabul to Damascus, the twenty-five years that redrew the Middle East, and the huge bill that came with it.
The victims: 2,977 lives, the forty who fought back, and more than forty Greeks among them.
Saint Nicholas: the little church across the south tower, and how it rose again in marble from the same mountain as the Parthenon.
The victims nobody counted: the second list of the dead, the one that has never stopped growing.
And finally, the original text in Greek.
