The 45-year-old father of the “Old Christian” family was arrested on Sunday morning (2/18), following a police operation accompanied by a prosecutor in Mountainous Corinthia.
A case has been filed against him for exposing minors to danger, infidelity, but also for the law on the compulsory attendance of children in school. The 45-year-old is expected to be brought to the Courthouse of Corinth either today or tomorrow, Monday.
During the police raid, the 15-year-old son of the 45-year-old man was found. The minor was transferred following a prosecutor’s order to the Children’s Hospital in Athens, where he will remain for the next few days. The investigations of the authorities to locate the rest of the children of the family as well as their mother are ongoing.
In the “microscope” of the prosecution authorities are the conditions under which the children of the family that was found living in a burrow in the village of Manna in Corinth live.
They are the three minor children of the family, two boys aged 13 and 15 and a little girl of six
What the family’s lawyer claims
The lawyer of the family of the early Christians, Andreas Theodoropoulos, spoke to MEGA about the case.
“These people live in nature and are completely normal. They are free after their arrest and a preliminary order was made with the help of Welfare for the situation of the children. I don’t believe there is any need for children to leave their parents. The 22-year-old has a baby who is with her here. Does it seem strange to you that people live in nature?”, Andreas Theodoropoulos told MEGA.
“The father and mother of the family make sure they have milk from the animals they own. They also have trees, olives, they are beekeepers. They are poor but honest people who wanted to live in nature. My principal even has Dostoyevsky books and is trying to educate the children. This knowledge may be superior to what any other body can give them. They are on a mountain top where they don’t have access to the school. If it is considered that they are a minority, then they have the right by law to provide education and training to their children themselves, without having the obligation of the state”, he added regarding the children’s education.
“The issue is the children”
The police editor of the newspapers “TO VIMA” and “TA NEA”, Vassilis Lambropoulos, spoke to MEGA about the case with the family that lives in burrows and carries bows and arrows.
“In this case it’s not just police issues, we have a group of self-proclaimed early Christians who suddenly in old age remembered this logic of the alternative lifestyle and live in caves and catacombs as early Christians. Someone tell them that Diocletian has been dead for several centuries and they are not in danger from some Roman emperor. The EL.AS investigation was done. and evidence was found and they are cited as being similar to two other cases, with the Amish in America who are a group of 30,000 people who are the so-called “New Baptists”, a movement that started in 1850 from Zurich. The Amish send their children to school up to the 8th grade, they are more organized, they don’t live in these squalid conditions, they have issues with inbreeding, with birth defects because they can’t relate to others but reproduce within their trial community,” he initially said.
“There are also the ‘Old Believers’, who came from a schism in the Russian church since 1666, and they are about 2 million. But they still don’t live in these conditions like they do,” added Vassilis Lambropoulos.
“The issue in this case is the children. They did not clarify their views and what they are aiming for. These situations are personal views of the parents. It may be but 1-2 houses, it is not a large group and such an issue is not developed in Greece because they would have been identified. It will be investigated for who they are and what perceptions they are. It’s a “fresh” issue, it’s not old,” added the journalist.
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