Giorgos Retrieves the Cross as Mihalis Disappears at the Epiphany Ceremony

Giorgos Ziras’s retrieval of the cross at the Theophany ceremony coincides with Mihalis Nikopoulos’s disappearance, turning a public religious contest into the beginning of a private and lasting punishment. Giorgos Ziras wins by finding the cross beneath a rock, but his victory is immediately overshadowed: Mihalis Nikopoulos is missing, and their bitter sporting rivalry makes Giorgos Ziras the focus of suspicion. With no body and no proof of a crime, the community nevertheless settles on its own judgment.

The ceremony and the contest

The cross-diving ceremony draws clergy, municipal dignitaries, local representatives of the army and navy, and a large crowd to the sea. The swimmers wait on a platform for the senior priest to release the cross. Victory promises a special blessing, but it also confers a hero’s standing in town. Mihalis Nikopoulos has held that position for ten years, repeatedly swimming to the cross with ease. Giorgos Ziras, by contrast, is a younger contender whose place in the contest is bound up with his rivalry with the established champion.

The priest dips the cross into the water twice before releasing it on the third immersion. The swimmers dive, and Giorgos Ziras is pushed from the platform only once the release signals that the contest has begun. In the water, he loses his goggles amid the crowded dives and cannot see clearly. He surfaces, then dives again toward the group searching beneath the boat. The scene makes the contest less a clean test of speed than a struggle in which visibility, breath, and position all matter.

Giorgos Ziras has heard rumours that the winner is chosen in advance, but he dismisses them because he believes his swimming makes him a genuine contender. Underwater, he sees the cross and another swimmer: Mihalis Nikopoulos, identifiable by the row of dolphin tattoos extending up his back and neck. Mihalis Nikopoulos swims away as Giorgos Ziras approaches. Giorgos Ziras takes this movement as a sign that the other man is going to the surface for air, leaving an opportunity to reach the cross.

Giorgos Ziras retrieves the cross

The cross is wedged beneath a rock. Other swimmers have pulled at it without trying to move the obstruction; Giorgos Ziras braces himself on the seabed and shifts the rock until the cross comes free. He takes the ribbon and swims upward with the cross held above his head, making it visible to the people gathered around the water. The physical act secures the victory, but its public meaning is unstable from the moment he emerges: the people who embrace and kiss him do so half-heartedly, and he senses that he was not expected to win.

After handing the cross to the priest, Giorgos Ziras returns to the platform. His schoolfriend Leonidas helps him out of the water, and his mother offers him a towel. As he dries himself, he notices that Mihalis Nikopoulos is absent. People begin asking where he is and whether anyone saw him or knew if he had reached the cross. The contest’s result is no longer the central concern. Giorgos Ziras’s success and Mihalis Nikopoulos’s disappearance have become inseparable events in the eyes of the crowd.

Search, suspicion, and exclusion

Several swimmers dive back into the water while others alert the priest; boats circle the area and spectators peer into the sea. Mihalis Nikopoulos’s mother and sisters cry out in grief, and a diver from a nearby town is summoned. Giorgos Ziras searches the water and recalls that Mihalis Nikopoulos had swum away from him. Yet the crowd’s questions about the cross and the rivalry quickly feed rumours about what happened.

The suspicion has a history. Giorgos Ziras has displaced the older and stronger Mihalis Nikopoulos on their team, and Mihalis Nikopoulos has turned the other team members against his rival. Their antagonism intensified after Giorgos Ziras outperformed him in goal the previous season. Now Giorgos Ziras is known to have been the last person who saw Mihalis Nikopoulos, while his victory at the ceremony gives the rivalry a newly ominous context. The narrative establishes those circumstances, but not that Giorgos Ziras caused the disappearance.

Residents search for three days, patrolling nearby beaches and stretches of shore where the currents might carry a body. They find nothing. Without a body there is no funeral and no finality, but Mihalis Nikopoulos’s father makes clear in the local kafenion whom he suspects. Police question the townspeople and speak to Giorgos Ziras last. Although gossip links Mihalis Nikopoulos to local crimes, his status as a sporting hero protects him from easy condemnation. In particular, the community overlooks an armed robbery in which two men were killed: Mihalis Nikopoulos’s brother and uncle were caught in the act and would stand trial for murder, while witnesses had also mentioned a third man and some had expected Mihalis Nikopoulos to be arrested. None of this establishes his guilt or explains his disappearance; it does show how selectively the town weighs what it knows.

Giorgos Ziras, who has never been in trouble, is instead cast as a ruthless competitor capable of anything to win. With neither body nor evidence, the police cannot arrest or formally charge him. The absence of a charge does not restore him to the community: in practice, the town has already decided who is responsible. Giorgos Ziras cannot leave without making flight look like an admission, and he begins to question his own innocence under the pressure of collective suspicion. Leonidas tells him that people refuse to hear what they do not want to hear.

A victory that governs a life

The sporting consequences follow quickly. Giorgos Ziras’s coach apologises but drops him because the team cannot function without the support of his teammates. Those teammates go on to success in the national championships, and three later compete at the Olympic Games. Giorgos Ziras takes work at a company an hour’s drive away, packing and exporting feta cheese, but continues to live with his mother. He avoids the town centre and, from spring through autumn, swims alone at an inaccessible beach on his way home; in winter he goes straight back to the house.

Three years after Mihalis Nikopoulos’s supposed death, a church service draws a congregation as large as the Theophany crowd. The service offers no resolution: the search produced no body, and the community’s suspicion remains. For nearly forty years, Giorgos Ziras lives as a shadow, present but socially diminished. He and his mother do not discuss the ceremony, yet he understands that she bears the strain of his unprovable innocence and the stigma attached to the family. The consequences of the disappearance therefore extend beyond the accused man, entering his mother’s everyday life as well.

Giorgos Ziras continues to attend the Theophany ceremony because it is the one day on which he can hold his head high and reaffirm his innocence. The swimmers are now the children and grandchildren of his generation, though many spectators are the same people who witnessed the original disappearance. The repeated ritual places the passing of decades beside an event that has never been settled. Giorgos Ziras cannot ask the clergy for forgiveness: he believes there is no sin to confess. He remains caught between the innocence he asserts and the guilt the town has assigned him, a man treated as a criminal without a crime.