book presentation
In honour of the 80th anniversary of the feat of the crew of Adrias, the legendary destroyer ship, FOUGARO invites you on Friday 23 February 2024 at 19.00 at the ANTHOS LIBRARY to get to know the book ADRIAS They were all heroes by journalist Margarita Pournara, published by CYCLOPS AMKE, on the story of the most fabled destroyer of our Navy during the Second World War.
The event will be addressed by:
Grigoris Voulgarakis, Hellenic Navy Rear Admiral
Christos Papageorgakis, Commodore
Thodoris Gonis, director – songwriter and the author
about the book
In over 210 pages with great photographic material, the book presents the story that had to wait for eighty years to be told. Adrias had a Captain who scorned fear, a Chief Engineer who became the deus ex machina who shaved the ship, a doctor with no equipment who saved dozens of heavily wounded men, officers/models of command and a crew of incomparable courage. These all could be fictional heroes — but they were real persons whose love for their country gave them superhuman power.
Adrias, a newly-built destroyer loaned by the British to the exiled Greek fleet, took part in the Dodecanese Campaign in 1943. The ship struck a German mine near Kalymnos which tore off the bow, but its crew managed to sail to the shores of the then-neutral Turkey without a compass, charts or an anchor. After some patchy repairs, they took the wounded hull on a 730-mile trip to Alexandria, triumphantly entering the city’s harbour. They were all heroes. This is an account of a feat so unique in the annals of seafaring as to seem a figment of the imagination; a story full of unexpected events and twists of fortune, but above all full of heroism and patriotism, featuring a handful of Greeks who had the name of their ship written with gold letters in the history of the glorious Hellenic Navy.
free admission
See you there!
Margarita Pournara
Born in Athens, Margarita Pournara studied French Literature in Athens and continued with postgraduate studies in Communications Policy in Britain. In 2009 she carried out research at New York’s Queens College on a Fulbright Foundation scholarship. She went into journalism in 1994, and since then she has worked on radio, television and the internet. In 1999 she joined the cultural department of Kathimerini, and in 2017 she started her own regular feature in the newspaper. In recent years she has specialised in interviews before live audiences as well as in a special series of cultural events of the Bank of Greece.
