'Someone has to pay Grief and fury over rail disaster

First came the mourning, then the handover of loved ones, then the funerals.

- Helena Smith

Last Friday, it was Athina Katsara, the young mother of a toddler, carried in a white coffin out of Katerini’s church in the first funeral of the first “angel” to die in Greece’s worst train crash.

Last Saturday, it was Iphigenia Mitska, in her early 20s like so many of the disaster’s 57 victims, to whom family and friends bade farewell. She, too, was buried in a white coffin in northern Giannitsa. There would be many others – identified through DNA samples provided by relatives – who will be laid to rest at the end of a three-day official mourning period for the nation.

In the days since 1 March when Intercity 62 – travelling from Athens to Thessaloniki with at least 350 people on board – collided head-on with a cargo train hurtling along the same piece of track, Greece has been thrown into grief, mourning in the words of its president “an unimaginable tragedy”.