Crowds of hundreds of thousands of people convened in nearly every major city in Greece on Friday to mark the two-year anniversary of the worst train disaster in the modern history of the country – and demand safety reforms to ensure it does not happen again.
The left-leaning newspaper Ta Nea reported that over 1 million people nationwide participated in marches, protests, and sometimes violent riots on Friday that took on an accusatory tone towards the federal government. The outrage was fueled in part by the publication of a report on the incident on Thursday that suggested the collision, between a passenger train and freight train, was caused in part by human error and indicated that the government had not made any significant reforms to address the problems identified. There is no evidence that anyone has faced any consequences for the failure to impose safety standards to prevent the accident.
The trains crashed in the town of Tempe, in eastern Greece, on February 28, 2023, completely destroying at least three cars in a fiery wreck. The passenger train involved was carrying hundreds of people and the death toll ultimately rose to 57 people, many of them university students.
The incident was met with immediate nationwide protests against center-right Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis, particularly those organized by unions representing railway employees fearing that their trains could be next to face a similar fate. Mitsotakis promised at the time that he would launch a judicial probe into the situation.
Mitsotakis insisted on Friday that he would continue to invest in improving safety regulations for the Greek rail network after the publication of the damning report the day before.
“Everyone’s thoughts are with the families of the 57 victims. With the injured. But also with those who survived this accident, forever carrying within them the wound of its memory,” he said in a statement on Friday, according to a translation by the Greek newspaper E Kathimerini.
The Kathimerini reported that “hundreds of thousands” of people nonetheless joined the protests on Friday, similar to the million-strong estimate by Ta Nea. Participants told the newspaper that they were present because they felt the government had not taken their concerns seriously and that riding trains was still not safe in Greece.
“The government hasn’t done anything to get justice,” one protester said. “This wasn’t an accident, it was murder.”
The protesters chanted slogans calling the government “murderers” and repeated the phrase “I have no oxygen,” referring to those burned to death in the fires. Another popular slogan heard was “you count profits, we count lives.”
Footage of the protests showed black-clad protesters starting fires in the middle of the street near Syntagma Square, Athens, and throwing garbage, apparently at government buildings.
Some reports indicated that protesters vandalized the Parliament building by spray-painting the names of those killed in the train collision onto the face of it.
Ta Nea reported that, in response to the violence, police used tear gas and water to dispel crowds, calling its use “excessive.” As of Friday afternoon local time, the newspaper reported that 29 people had been hospitalized in connection to the protests.
In addition to the protests, unions and advocacy groups called for a nationwide general strike that proved somewhat successful, as no trains, airplanes, and ships traveled in the country and a large number of businesses shut down in solidarity.
“All international and domestic flights were grounded as air traffic controllers joined seafarers, train drivers, doctors, lawyers and teachers in a 24-hour general strike to pay tribute to the victims of the crash,” Reuters reported.
Greece has a robust and violent organized left that has for decades successfully organized protests, and riots, for various reasons. The groups grew out of anti-austerity protests during the Greek debt crisis that emerged from its joining the Eurozone and reached their peak power by fueling the election of radical leftist Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras of the Syriza party in 2015, which represented almost the complete collapse of the establishment left Panhellenic Socialist Movement (Pasok) party at the time.
Protesters throw petrol bombs at police on February 28, 2025 in Athens, Greece. A nationwide strike has been called by unions in Greece, including air traffic controllers, to demand justice for victims of the Tempe rail disaster. (Hilary Swift/Getty Images)
Tsipras’s popularity collapsed as he found himself forced to negotiate debt bailout deals with some austerity measures in them, defying his campaign promises, resulting the a victory by Mitsotakis and his New Democracy party in 2019.
Despite aggressive efforts to overtake Mitsotakis in the 2023 elections immediately following the train crash, Greeks overwhelmingly voted for the conservative party and granted Mitsotakis re-election in 2023, indicating that concerns about train safety were not at the time sufficient for the left to regain control of the country.
Reuters noted on Friday that polls this week suggest that outrage over the Tempe crash nonetheless persists. According to a poll by the firm Pulse that Reuters highlighted, over 80 percent of Greeks said this week that the train crash was still “one of the most” or “the most” important issue in Greece.
“Every day, there is a demand to know the truth about what happened, and every day there is demand to for better safety measures in the workplace,” a protester, identified as municipal worker Costas Reintzopoulos, told Kathimerini. “That is a key reason why this remains relevant. We don’t want to mourn more dead people, who leave in the morning to go to work and we don’t know if they’ll come back.”
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