Athens, Greece – Anastasia Adamidi’s fellow students describe her as a brilliant young woman.
The 24-year-old dentistry postgraduate student from Cyprus was heading to the Aristotelian University of Thessaloniki late on February 28. She was to start her second semester on March 6.
But her family held her funeral on that day instead, and the department of prosthetic dentistry cancelled the day’s lessons.
Adamidou was one of 57 people killed when her passenger train collided head-on with a freight train at a combined speed of 280km/h in Greece’s worst-ever train accident.
“Part of her degree was to monitor undergraduates, and it’s no coincidence that everybody has something good to say about her,” said Thanos Venetis, a fellow doctoral student.
“She was always doing something for someone with a smile on her face. She was an excellent colleague, the type of colleague everyone would like to have,” he told Al Jazeera.
A photograph her family gave the media showed a smiling brunette in a powder blue suit and subfusc on her Bachelor’s degree graduation day.
Outside the laboratory where Adamidi had worked, people left flowers. Someone pinned up her picture.
“In memory of the tragic loss of Anastasia Adamidi, who was taken so young, we inform you that scheduled lessons in prosthetics, clinical practice and laboratory work on Monday 6 March will not take place,” her department announced.
The train disaster, and the fact that many young people were killed in it, has stirred Greeks to look for political culprits beyond the Larissa stationmaster who, according to leaked testimony, confessed to mistakenly sending the northbound passenger train up the southbound track.
Several opinion polls now show that the governing conservative New Democracy party has lost four points in advance of an election that must come by July, upending its expectations of a second term of single-party rule.
New Democracy has now said it will make sure there are two stationmasters on every shift when rail services resume on March 22.
Public hiring
Through a fast-track process that bypassed the normal state evaluation process through the Supreme Council for Personnel Selection, New Democracy hired 73 stationmasters, including the confessed culprit.
“That’s unacceptable,” said Christos Retsinas, a former head of safety…