The man who spent a year trying to bring peace between two families in Vorizia Heraklion spoke exclusively to Live News, revealing his desperate attempts to prevent the tragedy and offering his own self-criticism. Specifically, he discussed everything he did over the past year to build a bridge of understanding, the incident that escalated the confrontation to dangerous levels, and the explosive trigger that sparked the bloody battle. It should be noted that the reconciliation “mediator” took action more than a year ago to prevent the worst from happening.
How the misunderstanding began
“A misunderstanding started, their children had fought over property matters. One of F.’s children had stabbed one of K.’s children. This was never made public. They had been stabbed about a year ago. That’s where we intervened and spent three months trying to sort things out,” said the “mediator” who spoke with both families and heard their demands, however, his mission was far from easy.
“When the F. family stabbed the K. boy, the K. family’s demand was: ‘You stabbed our child? You want to settle this? There are no police, there’s nothing – we don’t want you in our neighborhood. Take your house, sell it, give it away somewhere, you can’t stay here.’ That’s how it started,” he said on the Mega TV show.
It’s worth noting that police tried to get involved in the case at the time, without any substantial result. The “mediator” continued his contacts and at some point, as he says, his efforts seemed to be paying off:
“Just when we had reached an agreement for them to accept the stabbing and all that, they said: ‘Sell the house, leave here.’ They didn’t go anywhere and that’s where the rest started. They told F. to buy the house, they told him to abandon it, they told him a thousand and two things, he didn’t do it. There needed to be balance there, something didn’t go well there, maybe on our part, maybe we should have demanded they leave and… the consequences,” he said specifically.
“We put on a temporary patch, we didn’t close the deal”
“We closed the deal: ‘far apart but beloved. I don’t talk to you, you don’t talk to me, your business, my business.’ In essence, we put on a patch, we didn’t close the deal 100%. For these cases to be closed, there needs to be a baptism, some kind of godparent relationship. So we put on a patch so they wouldn’t kill each other then, and they killed each other now,” he emphasized.
The agreement before the bloody battle
The “mediator” says that the climate in Vorizia about a year ago was different. He had even convinced himself that he had managed to make peace between the two families.
“In this case, we went on our own, no family will tell someone ‘fix this for me.’ We went over 50 times last summer and I brought 50-60 people to my shop and we celebrated. The whole effort lasted a year. Until the bombing, these two families had made peace. Last September, October, all this was settled. The night before last, as soon as the bomb went off, we couldn’t do anything else because we were exposed to this issue. Someone didn’t respect us,” he also mentioned.
And then he added: “On Saturday, the day they killed him, that day the murdered man was supposed to baptize the children. The bomb exploded and we don’t know who it is. It’s a man, woman, nobody knows. It could be a third party who said ‘now is the time for them to kill each other.’ In these cases there’s no money, blood isn’t paid for with money. There you can’t give right to either side. Both families handled it wrong there — and here are the results.”
Indeed, the man who attempted to reconcile the two families is certain that if the case had been handled exclusively by the older members of both families, the outcome would have been different.
“We must respect when we say we’re closing a reconciliation. The young people are the problem. The older ones, when they gave their word, even if damage was done, they never went back on it with them. With young people there’s no trust. And what happened, that’s the most worrying thing.”
Years ago the two families had attempted to resolve their problems through a godparent relationship. However, the couple divorced and their differences grew. It was the period when the first major reconciliation attempt began, which however was not successful.
