Trikerion
Trikeri is a town and a former community in Magnesia, Thessaly, Greece. It lies at the westernmost point of the hook-like Pelion Peninsula on the Pagasetic Gulf. It also includes the offshore islands of Paleo Trikeri (pop. 87) and Alatás (pop. 5). The municipal unit has a total population of 1,353 inhabitants (2011 census) and a land area of 26.817 square kilometres (10.354 sq mi). Its largest settlements are the towns of Tríkeri (pop. 1,022) and Agía Kyriakí (pop. 199), both on the mainland.
From 1947 the island of Trikeri was used as a concentration camp for female antifascist political prisoners during the Greek Civil War. The women and children were relatives of members of the EAM-ELAS, the resistance forces which had fought against fascist occupation during World War II.
In September 1949 political activists from other camps were sent to Trikeri, increasing the number of people held there to 4,700.
A small story:
Alfonso Hochhauser, was born in 1906 in the small town of Judenburg in Styria. Son of an artisan, he felt stifled by the family and town environment. Austria, born of the Treaty of St. Germain en Laye (1919), passed through a painful and difficult post war period and Alfonso fled his family for the first time at the age of 17. He returned, then left again for a journey towards the East. He arrived in Thessaloniki in the company of three young Austrians and had to leave without having realised his project, which was to publicise and bring to fruition the films which he wished to make with a camera given by his parents. Seduced by Greece he returned soon after in 1927 and lived there until 1938, at which date he became a German citizen (a consequence of the Anschluss) and was extradited from Greek territory. During these eleven bucolic years spent in Pelion, Alfonso, as he was called by the Greeks, received three separate visits from Werner Helwig, in 1935, 1937 and again in 1938. These three visits furnished Helwig with the material for his books, the first of which appeared immediately after 1939.
When Alfonso returned to Greece in 1957 he was already over 50 and needed to earn a living. So began the second period in Greece of this personality, which lasted until his death in 1981, near to Zagora, in the Pelion which he had helped to make well known.
He improvised at that time as a hotelier and tourism entrepreneur. He leased an abandoned monastery on the tiny island of Palaio Trikeri, facing the village of Trikeri. Trikeri is to be found in a very particular position in Pelion, of which it is the southernmost village at the far end of the peninsula. The tarmac road which links it to the other Pelion villages is quite recent and dates back just 15 or so years. Before its construction it was impossible to reach Trikeri other than by boat or at the most by a mule-track, a journey which took a whole day from Milina, the nearest community. At first sight the rough limestone range which separates Trikeri from the rest of Pelion has nothing to offer; it is totally without drinking water and only good for goats with a few olive trees in the hollows. The little island of Palaio Trikeri had been used during the Civil War as a prison for female political prisoners.