The City of Athens constructed a memorial ossuary dedicated to the 200 individuals executed on May Day in Kaisariani, as well as to the victims of the Kokkinia blockade. A large cross was placed at its centre. Over time, it also came to house the remains of other executed individuals. In 2008, it was decided to preserve the bones of victims from the German concentration camps of World War II due to the closure of the Neapolis Cemetery in the Municipality of Nikaia. The memorial features marble plaques with black-and-white narrative portraits.
On June 4, 1941, the first execution took place in Athens. As soon as I saw the announcement in the press, I saved the newspaper clipping so I wouldn’t forget the name of the executed, as if that first person would also be the last…
— Koula Xiradaki, Katohika (Occupation), Athens 2012
The recording and identification of those executed by the occupation security forces was an extraordinarily difficult but vital task, even during the Occupation itself. Despite the moral and historical importance of the matter, a combination of factors—mainly the complex nature or even the absence of primary sources—made this effort challenging and delayed its progress for decades. Thus, even today, although significant strides have been made in identifying the victims, the process remains incomplete, and the total number of victims is still unknown. On the plaques at the National Resistance Memorial, we read the following names and attempt to reconstruct their stories (listed in chronological order, with the list continuously updated):
Ioannis Koutsogiannis, June 17, 1943, aged 27. Landowner from Larissa.
On June 17, 1943, 19 prisoners from Averoff Prison were executed by lottery as retaliation for the explosion of the Italian ship Citta di Savoia in the port of Piraeus on June 12. According to the June 30, 1943 edition of the newspaper Eleftheri Ellada (Free Greece), although the Gestapo’s investigation revealed that “no Greek foot stepped on the ship,” the German general cynically declared that he was “obliged to execute Greeks for the safety of his troops, despite the fact that the explosion and sinking were caused by an English-made bomb similar to the one that destroyed a spotlight in Salamis four months earlier.”
Ten of the hostages were executed by the Germans in Kaisariani, while the remaining nine, including Ioannis Koutsogiannis, were executed by the Italians “near the Third Cemetery.”