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Fragments of History

We study history to understand the world and avoid mistakes from the past. But there is no universal truth: History is just a bunch of personal interpretations filtered through time.

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Cancer Gave This Man 6 Months To Live. By Some Miracle, He Took 102 Years

4 min readApr 30, 2025

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How Stamatis Moraitis healed on Ikaria
Small village Karavostamo on the seaside of Ikaria | Image by ArishG on Wikimedia Commons is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0

When he died in 2013, Stamatis Moraitis was cancer-free for over 40 years. Who would have known?

Back in 1976 in Florida, this Greek war veteran couldn’t climb up a flight of stairs. Shortness of breath and exhaustion continued for a while, so he finally went to a doctor. Turned out it was lung cancer — the incurable one with no chance of survival, especially in the 1970s.

He didn’t want to die and wasn’t ready for such a diagnosis, so he went to nine other doctors… But one after another, the guys in white coats told him he had six to nine months to live if he started chemotherapy immediately.

Stamatis couldn’t imagine his last days full of drugs and apprehension, so he didn’t undergo the treatment.

If doctors couldn’t provide the cure, that was it then. Already in his sixties, Stamatis accepted he would pass away soon. And although he’d worked hard all his life, he couldn’t afford a funeral in the US. Dying is an expensive business in the Land of Opportunity.

What could a man do? After decades abroad, Moraitis and his wife Elpiniki moved into his parents’ whitewashed house on the island of Ikaria, in the Aegean Sea near the Turkish…

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Fragments of History
Fragments of History

Published in Fragments of History

We study history to understand the world and avoid mistakes from the past. But there is no universal truth: History is just a bunch of personal interpretations filtered through time.

Maria Milojković, MA
Maria Milojković, MA

Written by Maria Milojković, MA

Serbian translator | Life is unpredictable but rewarding. Create, it will save you | For more articles, follow From Maria with Love 👉 https://bit.ly/3zcGLdE

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