After a brutal assault by up to 15 wild dogs on a volcano near Athens, three British children and their Greek guide were left traumatised.
Two weeks ago, Danny Kapetanios, nine, his father Stamatis, 52, and cousin Roxy, 11, were attacked by wild Rhodesian Ridgebacks while on vacation in Greece.
Teddy, age nine, was similarly encircled by dangerous wild dogs on the inactive volcano Sousaki on August 13, but he managed to escape unharmed.
Stamatis has returned home after a six-day hospital stay and is undergoing ‘psychological recovery,’ he stated.
Stamatis had to drive 25 minutes to the closest hospital with just one arm after his left arm was rendered paralysed after the violent attack.
Stamatis, a software engineer, told MailOnline that he experienced his “greatest fear” when a swarm of barking, murderous dogs encircled a group of people on a public walkway.
Upon first noticing the pack around 300 metres away, he said that the dogs quickly approached the group and displayed an evident “bloodlust.”
Tearful Stamatis explained: ‘We had walked around a kilometre on the tourist path before the dogs approached us. My first reaction was to put my body between the dogs and the children.
‘I was armed with only a backpack with the children’s water bottles. I used it to stop the dogs until they bit my arm so forcefully that it was thrown out of my arm. Then they knocked me to the ground and began biting.
‘I thought I was going to die.
‘I kept asking myself: “How can this possibly be the end?” I was losing the will to live. I felt I didn’t have any power.’
After the ferocious creatures rendered Stamatis ineffective, they pursued Roxy, Danny, and Teddy.
Roxy and Danny were bitten on the elbow and the bottom, although Teddy just escaped.
The sight of the children behind him prompted Stamatis to resume his efforts, he claimed.
‘When I saw the children around 30m behind me, it filled me a reason to keep going. It gave me some kind of divine power.’
Stamatis miraculously chased down the pack and was able to scare them away, sprinting with his children back to their vehicle at the bottom of the mountain.
They then drove to A&E – but Stamatis had no use of his left arm and had lost his phone in the attack.
He said: ‘I had to drive for 20 to 25 minutes without using my left arm. It was the hardest challenge of the entire day.’
Stamatis’s shaken wife Alison, whose sister Suzie is mother to Roxy and Teddy, described the scene of the four attack victims arriving at A&E.
‘Parents covered their children’s eyes to stop them seeing the bloodbath’, she said.
The children were swiftly given vaccinations, while Stamatis underwent two and a half hours of gruelling blood surgery as he had lost so much in the attack.
The father and uncle, who studied in the UK before living in Cambridge, was also given 50 stiches during a marathon six-day stay at a hospital in Athens.
He and wife Alison last week filed a lawsuit, which under Greek law targets ‘all parties responsible’ for the incident.
They said cops had reported the presence of the wild Rhodesian Ridgebacks in November 2021 – and said they were stunned that no one in the local authority had removed or destroyed the creatures.
The local government and the mayor are most likely at fault, they said, pending a police investigation.
Stamatis added: ‘The worst part for us is that this place is still open to the public.
‘If you go there, you go to meet death.’