TRIPOLI – A heartbreaking scene on February 2 in Tripoli at the funeral of Air Force Lieutenant (I) Marios-Michail Touroutsikas, who died on January 30 when the F4-E Phantom II in which he was flying with Squadron Leader (I) Efstathios Tsitlakidis went down in the sea near Andravida.

Hundreds of people, relatives, friends, as well as the political and state leadership of the country, attended the funeral of the 29-year-old lieutenant. His devastated parents moved the whole of Greece with the eulogies they delivered.

In fact, Marios-Michail’s mother could not bear the emotion and after the conclusion of her son’s funeral service and the exit of the body from Prophet Elias Church in Tripoli, she fainted.

Immediately the lieutenant’s mother was given water and she was given some space to recover, while an ambulance arrived at the scene.

“My child has left us too soon. Marios my boy, star of my soul, always smiling, you had never made me sad ever for anything. Decent and hardworking, giving to everyone. You were the son every mother would want in her arms. The best brother to your siblings. The best companion for your girlfriend, our Zoe. You became the Icarus of our hearts, the hero we will never forget,” said the lieutenant’s mother at the funeral.

She continued: “All of Greece shouts: ‘Immortal.’ To me you were and always will be my child. My angel that I admire. And if you only knew how much I will miss you. And finally, two verses to Marios, Stathis and the pilots who were lost: ‘The eagle dies in the air, free and strong. As soon as the bullet finds him, the sky embraces him’. Farewell, my sweet boy, good Paradise, my star, and as long as I breathe I will never forget you. My son was Lieutenant Marios-Michail, he died for his country. Immortal.”

Marios-Michail’s father bid him farewell, and had previously spoken several times about his son and his career in the Air Force.

“How could a person who was an egotist and verbose many times and perhaps not fair, beget and give life to a child like Marios? As a pharmacist with little scientific knowledge, I believe it was a mistake from RNA to DNA and he improved on it, I can’t give any other explanation,” began the lieutenant’s father.

“Marios as a young man had managed to achieve something very difficult that most of us cannot do, to annihilate his ‘ego’. He had erased it from his vocabulary. There was only you plural,” he continued in the few words he said he wrote on Wednesday night.

“He didn’t want to go on trips abroad, maybe so he wouldn’t leave his homeland. Only last year he asked us to go to the U.S. for his brother. He did not compare Greece with any other country in the world. I hope the homeland remembers him somewhere.
Maybe this way his soul can rest better. And as he told me when I asked him about his salary, he said ‘father, Greece does not owe me, I owe Greece.’ I believe his debt is paid in full. The consolation is that he died as he wished, too early but full of Greece. Farewell, my beloved son,” concluded the father of the deceased.