Panagiotis Lymberopoulos
Panagiotis Lymberopoulos was a passenger on the Titanic.
Background[]
Panagiotis Lymberopoulos was from Áyos Sóstis in the Messinia region of Peloponnesos, on the island of Zakynthos, Greece. This was his birth place, where he had sprung in the 1880s.
In later life, Pangiotis became the husband of a woman named Angeliki. Angeliki gave him a child. He was named Kostas.
Somewhere around 1906, he had relocated to America, where he built up a new life in Stamford, Connecticut and lived there for many years. Later, as is suggested, he was the owner of a small metal handicraft workshop. in New York.
In 1912, Lymberopoulos had returned to Greece to witness his son's baptism in the church of in the church of Áyos Ioannis. When that was done, he wanted to return to the New World, despite his wife’s pleas not to leave, as she wanted to spend more time with him and celebrate Eastern together, Perhaps she also had an odd feeling that something bad was going to happen, but he was steadfast that this was a golden opportunity.
His three other fellow citizens, Vasilios Katavelas and the Chronopoulos brothers, decided to travel with him. Panagiotis had encouraged them to migrate and convinced them of the route as he knew how good life could be in the United States. The older brother, Apostolos Chronopoulos, did simple labor work. He had been in America before. The other was Dimitrios. Apostolos had come to fetch him to give him a job in the USA as well. Vasililos Katavelas was a farmer who had sold some of his sheep to acost the large journey to the States at the advice of Panagiotis.
A ship brought them to Marseilles first. They probably had to be checked for health issues once they were there. As they were given the go-ahead, they had to make it to the North of France.
Titanic[]
On April 10, in the evening, the 4 Greek men boarded the Titanic via a tender in Cherbourg. Panagiotis and the others were Third Class passengers,
Her journey was without much incident, but that all changed when she was making good progress into her voyage on the night of April 14, when she used most of her grunt and steamed at 22.5 knots. An iceberg stood in her way, unbeknownst to anyone until it was too late to get past it safely. The lookouts saw it much too late and rang the bell while the Officers on the bridge turned the ship to port, with engines going in reverse, but they couldn’t prevent a collision. The Titanic sideswiped the iceberg with her broad starboard and cracks appeared when the hardened ice dented some parts of her hull below sea level. The inflow of water was immense. Tons of water had entered the ship in the first minute and the water level rose fast.
On April 15, at midnight, the Captain and the ship’s designer consulted. The ship’s mail room was flooding and they had to make a hard decision. Based on the evidence they gathered during a tour to the lowest part of the ship, they knew Titanic was not unsinkable and was going down in 2 hours time. The Captain therefore called his crew and told them to ready het lifeboats.
We don’t know how Panagiotis and the others fared, but none of them survived when Titanic met her tragic fate. There’s indication that Panagiotis had managed to get to the Boat Deck and the other Greeks had not. He could have made his way through on his own initiative. At 2:20 A.M, Titanic’s end was near. Her stern had rose up with her bow going down and she broke after her lights faded forever. The stern slid underwater and 1503 people died, which included the 4 Greek migrants.
After his death[]
The bodies of Mr. Lymberopoulos and Mr. Katavelas were located by the sailors of the ship Mackay-Bennett and could be identified. Panagiotis was number #196. He was buried at Mount Olivet Cemetry in Halifax, Canada on May 10th. Her personal effects were returned to his family back in Greece. The Mansion House Titanic Relief Fund donated £50 to Angelica in March 1913. The English Committee had £110 for her. She however wanted $35,000 for the loss of life and $5000 for the missing property.
His death is clouded in mystery. There were other, strange suggestions that he had abandoned his cabin in time when the Titanic began to sink, putting on a life jacket and in the end fell into the icy waters of the Atlantic. He supposedly managed to swim and find a boat with three other castaways on board. The boat drifted northwards, the fate of its passengers remaining unknown for a long time. Two months after the sinking, it was spotted on a rugged coast in Canada. All four castaways were found dead. There's even been mooted that he and these three others had been eating part of a lifevest out of hunger, to die on starvation in the end, but that sounds wild.
The part about the drifted boat looks a lot like the fate of First Class passenger Thomson Beattie, who was on Collapsible A but he died through the cold that was in the night and boat A then was left alone when other boats picked up remaining, living occupants. The Oceanic found this boat months later with three corpses, one of them being Beattie. Lymberopolous couldn't have been one of them, as he was officially found and identified by Mackay-Bennett, so that account is very conflicting with the official information.