The scientist and activist is “gone”.

An emblematic figure of social struggles and science “disappeared” on Sunday. On election night, Christos Trikalinos breathed his last at the age of 77.

The EKPA Emeritus Professor was found dead in his office at his home in Almyros, Volos. He was a student at the University of Athens, but interrupted his studies and went into exile in the USSR after the April coup. He studied at Lomonosov Moscow State University, where he also defended his doctoral thesis in nuclear physics. From 1981 he was a lecturer at the University of Athens.

Christos Trikalinos, an active citizen, solidly integrated into the field on the left, did not miss a single battle. From an early age he felt the persecution of the vanquished in the civil war, when shortly before the last moment of his life he was in the offices of OM Almyrou of SYRIZA-PS

As he writes in his autobiographical book, “Drops of Memory” (Aparsis editions), “I grew up without my parents, under the care of my grandmother Marigos Trikalinos of the Grammatiko family and my uncles Katina and Stavroula (Lula) Trikalinos. I first met my father in 1959 in Averof prison in Athens, while my mother and two younger siblings in 1967 in Moscow.”

He left exile in Trikeri, went to school thanks to his aunts who raised him (and to whom he dedicated the book he wrote), in 1964 he received the panthessal prize from the Mathematical Society, to transfer to the Athens School of Physics in 1967. The same year left for Moscow where he met his mother, enrolled at Lomonosov University in the School of Physics while simultaneously working on the Greek program of the Moscow radio.

In 1981 he started working at Physikos in Athens where he worked his way up the academic ladder until his retirement. He has supervised dozens of diploma and doctoral theses, while writing scientific works. He was a trade unionist in the HEIs and president of POSDEP. He was chairman of the Association of Alumni of the Soviet Union-Ukraine-Belarus University, of which he spearheaded. As soon as the association was announced, we also learned that he had prepared another book devoted to life in the Soviet Union: “A unique testimony through which it is easy to distinguish morality and knowledge of a man who had no illusions and knew how to judge good and bad.

It is no coincidence that in the preface to this book, entitled “Triumph and Decline”, he characteristically mentions: “I am not interested in the opinion of those who do not want to face the truth, however bitter be it. be for them. But I am interested in the opinion of the simple and unprejudiced reader who will be able to reflect, compare and worry. Not so much about what happened there, but about what needs to be done here and now, in the beautiful and enduring country in which we live.”

SYRIZA-PS with sadness says goodbye to the university professor and secretary of SYRIZA-Progressive Alliance in Almyros Volos. “Christos Trikalinos was a versatile personality. His academic contribution in the field of Physics has been widely recognized, while he also participated in the drafting of the educational file of the General Education of Physics for the 1st and 2nd High Schools. We express our condolences to his family and loved ones.” And the KKE press office expresses its condolences to his family and loved ones.

Christos Trikalinos’ note on the back cover of the book “Drops of Memory”

This book is not a story with a beginning, a middle and an end, but scattered mosaics, they are like drops falling in the glass of life which is not yet full, but it warns that this day is not that far.

Our own generation, we who were born in the civil war without having lived it, but we have tasted the consequences, we who spent our childhood in the difficult post-war period, we who lived through the rise and fall of the dictatorship, without belonging to those who called – by some with admiration and by others today with disdain – the “polytechnic generation”, we who have felt the bitterness of forced alienation and the acclamation that ensued, have much to say.

Yes, each of us has our own unique life, our own unique experiences, our own perspective on events. But the historical and social context was common to all of us.

Thus was born the idea of ​​trying, before the glass is full, to scatter some of these drops of memory, to capture them on paper with the wish and the hope that they “cool down” some people and constitute at the same time my own testimony, for this little piece of history which I witnessed.