‘Nobody forced us’: the Greek builder who saved 80 Afghans from the sea

On Monday, 66-year-old is to be honoured in Athens for his actions on night both tragic and awe-inspiring 

ichalis Protopsaltis does not see himself as a hero. When the news of the shipwreck came through, he did, he says, what any man in his position would do. The construction company owner dispatched a crane to the Kythira clifftop and, one by one, began saving the 80 Afghan immigrants scrambling for dear life in the waters below.

Three hours elapsed before the last refugee – originally bound for Italy on a yacht that had set sail from the Turkish town of İzmir – was winched to the top.

When he appeared, sodden and shell-shocked in the sand bag attached to the crane, Protopsaltis felt a pang of relief but also nausea at what he had seen: the men, women and children who had not been saved, who had flailed about in the sea, screaming and shouting as they tried to scale the jagged rocksthat had shipwrecked the boat.

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On Monday, almost three weeks after the dramatic scenes unfolded on the island, the 66-year-old will be honoured in a ceremony at Athens’ ministry of maritime affairs. The events of that night, both tragic and awe-inspiring, are still reverberating. The Greek prime minister, Kyriakos Mitsotakis, has telephoned to thank him personally.

“What we witnessed that night was hellish, absolutely frightful, something I never thought I would ever see,” Protopsaltis told the Guardian. The sea was howling, the wind was howling, the waves were just so big and all these people down there in that rocky cove, trying to keep steady, trying somehow to get into the bag, sometimes two at a time but mostly one at a time, so the crane could lift them to the top.”

“Neither I, nor anyone else who was there, and there must have been around 100 of us, thought twice,” he said, adding that with the aid of ropes at least 20 had also survived. “Nobody forced us to help. All this talk about Greeks letting migrants die in the sea has infuriated me because it’s not true.”

The Greek media has also gone to town hailing the heroism of a man who could easily have chosen not to act when the yacht – a vessel with a maximum passenger capacity of 15 but carrying 95 people – ran aground off Diakofti, Kythira’s main port. Even his sisters in Sydney – for no Greek isle has seen more of its community migrate to Australia than Kythira – have been in touch to say they have seen him on CNN.

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Only now, Protopsaltis concedes, has the “significance and value” of what he, and his fellow Kythirians achieved, hit home. “All this talk about heroism is overblown. What we did was only human. In Kythira we always help people in need. From America and Argentina to South Africa and Australia there are Kytherians and, so, all of us have lived the experience of migration. I don’t know what has been happening further afield [in Greece] but we’d