Akis Murders Savina's Father and Brother Years Later

Akis Murders Savina's Father and Brother Years Later is the culmination of Akis Adamakos’s decades-long wait after his bride failed to come to their wedding. On an evening when a stopped clock, a child in wedding clothes, and a church he has avoided for twenty-five years converge, Akis takes the gun he has kept in his car and carries out his revenge against Savina’s family. The violence does not reunite him with Savina or end his fixation: he neither finds nor pursues her, and the account leaves him in prison while she remains absent from the funerals.

The long wait

At the moment this episode begins, the clock in the square has stopped with its hands at one minute before five. The frozen time recalls the moment when Akis still hoped that Savina would come to marry him. Years have passed, but the story presents his expectation as never fully relinquished. Those around him have pleaded for immediate action; he has refused, insisting that the time has not yet come. His restraint is therefore not the same as letting go: it extends the wait and leaves the possibility of revenge unresolved.

Akis has increasingly relied on tsipouro as the years have gone by, and the narrative allows that this may make him doubt what he sees. In the square, he watches two girls in pink playing near the fountain. A boy of about eight runs among them, apparently unnoticed and undeterred by their game. He wears a light grey wedding suit and patent shoes. In the square’s social scene, he is, like Akis, unpaired and alone. The child’s formal clothes recall the wedding that never took place, while his age and carefree movement make him resemble Akis as he imagines himself before disappointment consumed his life.

Following the child into the church

Akis sees the boy as a vision of his own innocent, carefree self. The contrast is stark: the child is dressed like a man, while Akis, overcome by emotion, feels close to tears. The boy avoids the girls and skips up the stairs; in the fading light, Akis leaves his customary coins on the metal table and follows. The act breaks his routine in the square and directs him toward the church.

The boy turns left at the top of the steps, toward the church. By the time Akis arrives, he is nowhere to be seen, but the church door stands open. Akis has not entered for twenty-five years. He passes a bullet-hole in the wall and walks inside, where dark icons cover the walls. At the altar he looks up at a cross resting on a golden skull with crossed bones. The scene places him before an image of mortality, but offers no assurance that he will turn away from violence.

Akis then sees the boy standing in the shadows at the back of the church, looking directly at him. The child’s appearance has shifted from a possible image of Akis’s lost innocence into a challenge. When the boy opens the door, outside light catches his silvery suit; then he disappears. Akis finds no trace of him in the street. As he passes the square on his way to his car, the clock strikes five and starts again. The sequence gives the stopped clock and its resumed chime the force of a threshold: after twenty-five years of suspended expectation, Akis acts.

Revenge and its limits

Akis has kept a gun in his car for a quarter of a century. Once the clock resumes, he takes it as the moment to end the long wait. That evening he drives back to the village outside Nafplio where Savina’s family lives and kills her father and brother. He leaves her mother and sister alive. The account establishes the killings and the choice of victims without detailing the violence; its emphasis is on the consequences of Akis’s decision and on what he does not do next.

He does not track Savina down. The revenge is directed at her family, not completed through a confrontation with the woman whose absence has governed his life. Akis is arrested on the day of the murders. Savina does not return for the funerals. The narrator suggests that she may have feared that Nikos, Akis’s best man, would continue the violence, but presents this as a possibility rather than a confirmed reason for her absence. The story likewise leaves open whether Akis’s fixation arose from the loss of Savina, the loss of face, or both.

The story’s aftermath

The murders are recounted to the narrator by a couple in Nafplio, who explain what followed Akis’s failed wedding. Their account reaches her at a time when she is grieving a relationship of her own. She recognizes an unsettling parallel between Akis’s abandonment and her own experience, but distinguishes sorrow from the wish to kill: she reflects that her grief would not have given her the strength to lift and fire a gun. Murder might offer catharsis, she considers, but she cannot know that it would.

That response places the episode’s revenge plot beside another possible aftermath of loss. Akis’s grief has lasted a quarter of a century and culminates in the destruction of two lives, yet it does not bring Savina back or give him knowledge of where she is. The narrator imagines the prison as the likely setting of his continuing uncertainty, wondering whether he remains consumed by questions about Savina and her life. The story’s ending thus withholds any redemptive payoff: the clock moves again, the murders have occurred, and the long wait persists in another form.