It was a catastrophe, the civil war
Ioannis Nitsios was born on the 27th of January 1929 in the village of Langadia, in the poverty-ridden region of Macedonia in northern Greece. He went to school for only two years, before the local teacher was arrested and the school closed. During the Greek Civil War waged from 1946 to 1949, he took to the hills and joined the leftist Democratic Army of Greece. He took part in many bloody battles, living in the mountains for two years. When the ceasefire came, he left for the USSR with other partisans and travelled to Tashkent, as per the invitation of the Soviet government. He spent a very pleasant eight years there. His family was scattered all over Europe - his brother lived in Kiev, part of his family remained in Greece, his father with his second brother and his sister were in Czechoslovakia - in 1958 he joined them in Staré Purkartice by Krnov. He had always wanted to return to Greece, but his situation did not allow it. He now lives in Krnov.