Thessaloniki Municipality

Greek President Katerina Sakellaropoulou will attend the annual silent memorial march for Holocaust victims in the northern port city of Thessaloniki on Sunday. 

This year marks the 80th anniversary of the first train conveying Jewish inhabitants of Thessaloniki to Nazi execution camps, where an estimated 50,000 Thessaloniki Jews were slaughtered. 

Divers removed 21 electric scooters from Thessaloniki offshore, FOCUS News Agency reported. In addition to the scooters, two engines, bicycles and suitcases were found at the bottom of the sea.

In cooperation with the Thessaloniki Municipality, the Hellenic-German Chamber of Commerce and Industry is holding a Christmas bazaar inspired by German holiday traditions on Saturday, December 15. There will be snacks (with plenty of sausages), mulled wine and traditional German music, along with a Weihnachtsmarkt. The event is open to the public from noon to 9 p.m.

A second corruption trial involving Ex-Thessaloniki Mayor Vassilis Papageorgopoulos was postponed until March 16 next year on Monday.

Papgeorgopoulos, already serving a prison sentence for embezzlement, was due to be tried with 16 others in connection to some 1 million euros that was found to be missing from municipal coffers.

Ex-Thessaloniki Mayor Vassilis Papageorgopoulos, already serving a prison sentence for embezzlement, is to due to stand trial in a separate corruption case on Monday.

Papageorgopoulos and another 16 people are due to be tried in connection to some 1 million euros that was found to be missing from municipal coffers.

The former mayor of Thessaloniki, Vassilis Papageorgopoulos, says he will take his appeal against a jail sentence for embezzlement to the Supreme Court.

“I think everyone realizes that my name has been unjustly blackened,” the ex-public official said in a statement. “The verdict against me was a matter of expediency. I was a scapegoat. My only hope is the Supreme Court.”

A court in Thessaloniki on Monday reduced a life sentence for embezzlement imposed on the city’s former Mayor Vassilis Papageorgopoulos earlier this year to a 12-year term but the ex-official insisted that he has been wrongly accused and called on Prime Minister Antonis Samaras to intervene on his behalf.