{"id":9890,"date":"2026-06-10T10:45:00","date_gmt":"2026-06-10T07:45:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/en.tomanifesto.gr\/?p=9890"},"modified":"2026-06-10T10:45:00","modified_gmt":"2026-06-10T07:45:00","slug":"maria-pantiska-the-girl-from-distomo-who-will-live-forever","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/en.tomanifesto.gr\/?p=9890","title":{"rendered":"Maria Pantiska: the girl from Distomo who will live forever"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Today, June 10, 1944. <b>Distomo. <\/b><\/p>\n<p>In 1944 there may not have been internet, but a single photograph taken by the Ukrainian photographer and Life magazine&#8217;s envoy to Greece in the autumn of that year, <b>Dmitry Kessel<\/b>, was to become the <b>timeless symbol of Nazi atrocities in our country<\/b>. His lens captured <b>Maria Pantiska<\/b>. Just four months after the murder of her mother, her gaze remained immersed in mourning. Crushed.<b>In her face was reflected not only the pain of an entire village, but the heartbreak of a nation tortured at the hands of a ruthless conqueror.<\/b><\/p>\n<p>Distomo is not just one of the darkest pages of the Occupation. <b>It is an open wound of our collective memory. <\/b>In retaliation for an ELAS guerrilla ambush in the area, in which dozens of German soldiers were killed, the Nazi forces launched a <b>precedented massacre<\/b> against civilians. <b>Women, children, infants and the elderly were targeted in a frenzy beyond all human reason.<\/b><\/p>\n<p>The testimonies speak of <b>executions, torture, rape and acts of unspeakable cruelty<\/b>. The exact number of victims varies depending on the sources, but it is certain that <b>more than 218 people died horribly.<\/b><\/p>\n<\/p>\n<p>Maria Pandiska&#8217;s photograph may have become a symbol of collective memory, but it is also a call from history to avoid lethargy. For when man forgets, he repeats.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Today, 10 June 1944. Distomo.<br \/>\nThe internet may not have existed in 1944, but a single photograph taken by the Ukrainian photographer &#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":9891,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9890","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-blog"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/en.tomanifesto.gr\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9890","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/en.tomanifesto.gr\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/en.tomanifesto.gr\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/en.tomanifesto.gr\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/en.tomanifesto.gr\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9890"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/en.tomanifesto.gr\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9890\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/en.tomanifesto.gr\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/9891"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/en.tomanifesto.gr\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9890"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/en.tomanifesto.gr\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9890"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/en.tomanifesto.gr\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9890"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}