I only heard my heart beating
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Sterios Kiriazopulos was born on 23 April, 1934 in the village of Spilea in the area of Epirus in the North Eastern Greece. Together with his parents, Fotis and Argira and twelve years older brother Petros they lived in a stone house with a small farm. Fighting for the resistance organisation ELAS his brother participated in fighting with the German invasion units. Later he refused the governmental decision on giving up the guns and spent two years in prison. After release he escaped to partisan units of the Democratic army of Greece (DSE), and fought for them during the Greek civil war. In 1948 the parents and twelve years old Sterios fled to Albania. The parents were later sent to Poland and then to the village of Nové Vilémovice in Czechoslovakia. After the end of civil war the brother Petros, who twice suffered war injuries, was sent along with most partisans to the Soviet Union, specifically to Tashkent in Uzbekistan. Sterios ended up in the children shelter in the Hungarian village of Högyesz. He met his parents in Nové Vilémovice only in 1954. Two years later his brother Petros also moved to Nové Vilémovice from Tashkent. Sterios Kiriazopulos then studied construction engineering college in Havlíčkův Brod. For many years he worked as a master in a construction company in Jeseník. In 1965 he married Konstantina Preku, whose family also fled from Greek civil war. In 2017 Sterios Kiriazopulos still lived in Javorník.
