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Vasiliki and Panayiotis Rikkou

FOR MOST, the onset of summer means travel and adventure, for the relatives of the Helios crash victims, August makes the weight of the dead on their backs that bit heavier.  
Five years have passed since the aviation crash that sent spasms through society and prompted a wave of public grief unprecedented in peacetime. For the relatives of the victims, little has changed since the day the ground was ripped from under them.
On the fifth anniversary, the Sunday Mail visited two families struggling to deal with the most penetrative and resilient kind of grief: personal loss.
For those interviewed, life stopped on August 14, 2005. Black remains the colour of choice. Justice will never be served. Their preferred outing is the daily visit to the cemetery. Both have seen the dead.
Vasiliki and Panayiotis Rikkou were in their Farmakas home when they got a call from their daughter Constantia calling them back to Nicosia. Earlier that morning, their first daughter Maria, 27, had left for Athens with her 31-year-old fiancé Paris Demetriou. The two had just got engaged two weeks earlier.
As the plane prepared for take-off, Panayiotis accidentally telephoned Maria instead of his other daughter in Nicosia. Maria was on the plane.
“When she told me she was flying, you could feel the enthusiasm in her voice,” said the 57-year-old black-clad father.
Vasiliki, 58, then lay down on her bed. While resting, she had a strange thought. What if the plane should fall with her children inside? “I woke up and said, ‘my God, what are these thoughts, the Virgin Mary would never let this happen.’ Then my husband put the TV on and heard that a plane had crashed.
“When I asked the priest, he said it was Maria’s soul letting me know, because in the first moments, God allows the soul to go wherever it wants,” she said.
The parents returned to their house in Lakatamia where they waited for news of the crash. At this point, they were not even sure if Maria and Paris were on that plane. Then the call came in: Paris and Maria were the first on the list.
“The ground collapsed beneath my feat,” said Vasiliki.
“I was holding their picture in my arms when I heard,” said Panayiotis.
“Then you ask yourself, how can time pass without Maria and Paris? How can we live without our children?” said the mother.
A brief look around the living room confirms that time has passed painfully slow for the Rikkou family. The walls and surfaces are filled with photos of Maria and her fiancé. Maria had only just finished her PhD in Chemistry at the University of Cyprus. The degree was awarded posthumously in 2006. The only other photos are of in-laws and their other daughter Constantia, 30, who married last year.
Vasiliki recalled a scene some days before the crash when Maria complained that Vasiliki was spending too much time with her own mother. “I laughed and said ‘let me see my mother now that I can and there will be plenty of time to spend with you’. And now my mother still lives while Maria...”
Panayiotis and Vasiliki are aware that their grief may end up marginalising Constantia and confess that their only remaining ambition is to have grandchildren.
“Five years on, time has stood still. We stopped going to weddings, listening to music, having any sort of fuss. Only now since we married Constantia off, are we obliged to go to a few weddings,” said Vasiliki.
“We don’t socialise with our friends and relatives, but we do meet relatives of the victims. They understand us more,” she added.
“You get a sweet kiss or hug when you meet. We are one family now,” said Panayiotis of the relationship with other relatives of the victims.
The pair has only travelled once since the crash to testify in Greece. The only time their faces brighten throughout the interview is when they speak of the daily visit to Maria’s grave.
“It looks like a florist’s shop. Our life and work is deciding what to plant for Maria, which flower would be good for her,” said Vasiliki.
For Nitsa Constantinou, 71, from Yeri, there is no respite from the loss of her son Michalis, 38, his wife Irene, 36, and her two grandchildren Petros, 13, and Soteris, nine.   
“Our lives stopped in 2005. As time passes, it gets worse. By the time you get over one, the other comes, and the other and the other. My home is empty.
“I hear a car stop outside and I imagine it’s my grandchildren and daughter-in-law coming with her noisy sandals. I go to the window to see if they’ve come. It’s torture. They brought back four boxes. We didn’t even see them dead. You think they’ll come back,” said Nitsa.
She goes every year to Grammatiko, the site of the crash in Greece. “I go because I believe it is a holy place. My children left something there. As long as I can move, I will go,” she added.
Along with Michalis and his family on the plane was his business partner, his wife and two of his three children. Nitsa shows a picture of the two families together. Of the nine, only the youngest, an infant, is alive today.
Nitsa lives just a stone’s throw from her second daughter, Frosso, 46, who in turn lives next to the house owned by Michalis. After spending horrifying moments trying to ascertain whether their brother and his family were on that fallen plane, Frosso had to go to Greece to identify the bodies.
“They called me to give a DNA sample. I wanted to go in and identify the bodies. The health minister at the time, Andreas Gabrielides, told me not to go in. It was a terrible scene, he said, and no one was recognisable.
“My husband Leonidas went inside. He’s a fireman and has seen many dead. I’ll never forget how he looked when he came out, as if he was about to drop. He couldn’t find them,” said Frosso. Leonidas has since forbidden the family from ever travelling together again.
Frosso has a daughter in her twenties and a son the same age Soteris, her godson and nephew, would have been had he lived today. Her children’s bedrooms look out to her brother’s house. “I don’t know how many months passed before they could open their windows again,” she said.
Asked if time helps to heal the wounds, Frosso was absolute in her response: “This September is their wedding anniversary, November is Michalis’ name day, December, January and February, their birthdays. And then there’s Christmas...”
She still goes every day to the four graves in the corner of the Yeri cemetery reserved for the village’s nine Helios dead. Summer is the worse time. There is no question of holidaying in summer. She still wears black, five years on.
“I know moving on is the right thing to do for my children but it’s like having half of your heart dead. How can you live normally? Better maybe, but never normally.”
Frosso often dreams of Michalis, who tells her not to worry, that everything is fine. “This is what you end up seeking, you sleep and pray that you’ll see them in a dream. When I do, I wake up feeling euphoric, and remember it for days,” she said.
“All the times I’ve seen him in dreams, he’s never spoken to me,” said her mother, though he did appear once briefly standing outside the kitchen door.
“I try to deal with it alone. One day last year I was at my neighbours. They said something funny and I laughed out loud, then he came to mind, and I shouted ‘Sorry, my son, sorry, I didn’t mean to’,” said Nitsa.