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Respect for the dead is an ancient Greek custom. After every battle, a truce was held in order to gather and care for the dead for their final journey, as eminent ancient Greek authors tell us in their writings.
The burial of the dead, and especially of warriors, is for us Greeks a sacred duty and supreme duty, an internal need and a national imperative. It is not a simple, formal procedure. The dead must be approached with reverence, regardless of who they are. Something similar, however, is not the case with the Greek dead of the Greco-Italian war, of the epic of 1940.
Thus, eight thousand dead soldiers, officers and other volunteers, who fought against German-Italian fascism and preserved Greek honor by giving lessons of heroism and bravery to humanity, remained unburied or roughly buried in the sacred lands of Northern Epirus. The bones of many of them remain scattered to this day in the mountains and plains. The Greek state was indifferent to those who gave their homeland the most precious gift, their lives, and wrote the most glorious pages of modern Greek history.
Sixty-nine years after the end of the Greco-Italian War and after the Albanian government requested the Greek Parliament to ratify the Stability and Association Agreement with the European Community, on February 9, 2009, a cooperation agreement was signed between the Governments of the Hellenic Republic and Albania for the search, exhumation, identification and burial of the Greeks who fell during the Greco-Italian War of 1940-41.
Today, only in the village of Vouliarates in Northern Epirus is there an organized Greek military cemetery, where in 1940-41 a field hospital of the Greek army operated and those who succumbed to their wounds were buried. A second cemetery exists in the narrows of Kleisoura, it has been ready for almost six years, on the initiative of the Archbishop of Albania Anastasios. Scattered graves of Greek soldiers exist in many parts of Northern Epirus. They are found everywhere. In Trebesina and Pogradec, in 731 and Kleisoura on the heights of Bubivi and in the plain of Vourkos. In Mali Spat and Korçë. Buried as-is during the operations, lost in the snow. Italian medical companies collected the bones of their own and Greeks after 40, in large organized cemeteries: "Enemies in war. Comrades in death."
Inscriptions that the Hoxha regime quickly took care to eliminate. Our Great Dead are everywhere. In Artza they still remember, after the operations, scattered Greeks and Italians, embraced dead in battles, body to body. On hill 731 we counted 20 fragments of shells and mortars per square meter, 178 of our dead.
In Zagori, stories about the soldiers who were hosted in the houses. Evidence, touchingly misspelled from the requisitions of animals and supplies. In Dragoti of Kleisoura towards Tepeleni, a square area of ​​about 4 acres stands out in the narrow valley. Uncultivated since the war, in 1993, children from the theological school came here, they built an access to the main road with stones that they carried from the mountain. Around the cemetery they threw river pebbles. In Vouliarati, the residents rebuilt the old cemetery. They placed crosses, they say they know the names. In Arovachni. on the mountain. at Prophet Elias. many were hit, by mistake. by friendly fire. Today nothing survives. There are all three of our Great Dead in the hospitable cemetery of the beach. These dead, because they fainted and retreated. Our summary and the decision is immediately enforceable. They are everywhere, buried on the banks of the rivers, under "palaces of culture" next to the big olive tree, on the eastern side, thrown into the pit with the lime, under the school, on the tops of the mountains, to the right of the road, next to the stream, next to the church.
"Kathimerini" of the last Sunday of October 2015, in the following pages, brings to light, for the first time, the complete list of officers and soldiers -7.948 souls- who fell during the Greco-Italian War of 1940-41 within Albanian territory.

Download HERE! the tables with the names of the Dead!