Today marks fifteen years since the tragedy at Marfin on May 5, 2010, when three people – 32-year-old pregnant Angeliki Papathanassopoulou, 36-year-old Epameinondas Tsakalis, and 35-year-old Paraskevi Zoulia – lost their lives after a fire was set by hooded assailants at a bank branch on Stadiou Street during a massive protest against the first Memorandum.

Among the images of the tragedy, perhaps the most iconic is that of the female bank employee who appeared on the balcony calling for help while smoke and flames engulfed everything around her.

Maria Karagianni, as her name is, spoke about the “absolute terror” she experienced that day, being the last person firefighters rescued from the building.

As she recalls, “I was in the basement and heard very loud bangs from the ground floor and glass shattering. We locked the vault and I called 100 [emergency line] from the basement phone.”

“They were asking me, ‘How many of you are in the building? How many attackers?’ I told them, ‘I can’t see through the smoke.’ I tried to call the fire department, but the phone stopped working. Out of fear, I moved quickly and, unfortunately, took the elevator to the third floor, where I knew there were windows,” Ms. Karagianni continued.

Describing what she found there, she said: “When I got there, it was chaos. My colleagues were crammed in a narrow hallway, trying to find an escape route through a room that was used as storage. There was a cage there for the air conditioning units. From what I learned, our colleague Ilias broke open the hatch with all his strength, and slowly, helping one another, we climbed out onto a 1×2 balcony with some spikes, trying to reach a corrugated roof and get over to Christou Lada Street.”

Her next move was to get to the main balcony on Stadiou Street after seeing “a colleague on the main balcony talking on the phone, and I wanted that phone to call someone and tell them we were in danger.”

“I don’t remember if I managed to explain the situation, and then minutes later came total chaos. Smoke blowing everywhere, we couldn’t see if we could reach the adjacent building. We couldn’t see where to step. Three out of the five of us on the balcony managed, at great personal risk, to cross to the neighboring balcony using a narrow ledge.”

The next moments were harrowing: “We were the last two left on the balcony, and we couldn’t see – the smoke had thickened. You couldn’t breathe. I kept thinking that with the next breath I wouldn’t make it. All this lasted for 40 minutes… I kept asking, ‘Where is the fire department?’ We experienced absolute terror for about 40 minutes.”

“At that moment, it was either I’d be saved, or within the next two minutes, I wouldn’t have air and would collapse. The moments were tragic – absolute terror, madness. I was the last person firefighters pulled from the interior of the building. The fire was so intense that everything inside looked bombed out. You were stepping on rubble. In the following days, we saw that the marble on the stairs had cracked, probably from the heat,” the bank employee continued.

Finally, speaking about her final moments before exiting the building, she said, “They put a gas mask on me, a jacket over my back, and lit the way where I could walk. Supported by rescuers, I managed to be brought down.”