Displaying items by tag: kalavryta

Hellenic Police - ELAS arrested the abbot of a monastery in Kalavryta and his assistant after receiving information that he was preparing to sell Byzantine icons and two 18th-century Gospels.

A 4.6-magnitude earthquake shook the town of Kalavryta, in the Peloponnese region of Greece, on Sunday.

On the early morning of December 13^th, 1943, the people of Kalavryta, in the mountains of Achaea, Peloponnese, woke up to the sounds of ringing church bells. The omens were bad. Within hours, at 9.00am, the first German soldiers of the Wehrmacht 117^th Jägerdivision appeared in the town’s main road. The orders were definite: Everyone should assemble to the local school. Half an hour later all women and children were locked in the schoolhouse while all men, between 12 and 80 years of age, were lined up and driven to a nearby hillside (Kappi Hill). The infamous “Unternehmen Kalavryta” (Operation Kalavryta) had just begun. In less than three hours the heroic town would be burned to ashes and only 13 of its male inhabitants would survive to keep the memory of their beloved ones alive, along with the shocking testimonies describing the Nazis’ atrocities.