Athens, GreeceThe first signs of trouble appeared around noon on Thursday August 5. Wisps of thick black smoke darkened the sky to the south and west of the Greek hill where my partner and I had rented a holiday home. Within hours, an acrid plume fell over this once idyllic stretch of the Peloponnese mountains. Fire patrols began to roam the adjacent mountainside. At 1 a.m., when the whole village seemed awake and anxiously scanning the peaks for flames, the stench was so powerful that we had difficulty breathing. Loading our luggage into the car, we drove down the valley and made the long overnight journey back to Athens.
Even in the Greek capital, there is no escaping the crisis that is ravaging much of the country. A series of superimposed fires on and around Mount Parnitha, which borders the city to the north, has shrouded Athens in a noxious black cloud. There has been little blue sky here. There’s not much power either. The government had to implement gradual power cuts in many neighborhoods after the flames ravaged vital sections of the electricity infrastructure. This only added to the feeling of the end of the day, as cars sped through inoperable traffic lights on major avenues and pedestrians reluctantly donned the masks they had only recently been allowed to throw away when COVID restrictions were eased.
“I’ve barely slept all week,” my local fruit seller told me, with bags under his eyes, as I stocked up on my return. “This year, it’s just problem after problem after problem.”
It’s August, the month when many Athenians and other city dwellers flee to their ancestral villages for much-needed relief, and after months of strict pandemic lockdowns, Greeks need a break more than ever . It doesn’t happen that way. A major fire has already ravaged the northern third of Euboea, Greece’s second largest island. Several others, including the one that drove me from the Peloponnese Peninsula, have eaten into some of the country’s most breathtaking wilderness.
All in all, there was at least at least 56 active fire fronts Friday, according to state civil protection officials, a figure that would already make it one of the largest in Greece. most devastating fire seasons Again.
As with the fires that ravaged the Pacific Northwest in the United States in June and early July, and the Dixie fire, which became the second largest in California history, the Greek fires appear to be at least partly linked to climate change. After experiencing severe drought for months and most sustained heatwave Since the 1980s, with temperatures exceeding 40°C for almost 10 days in the Athens region, Greece has been a powder keg. It took a little more than a mix of natural sparks, human carelessness and perhaps criminal fire to ignite it. Similar conditions across the eastern Mediterranean have triggered what will likely be the worst fires everwhich burned parts of more than half of the 81 provinces and left entire swaths of Italy and other European states on fire.
Forests are not the only ones threatened
But perhaps what sets Greece apart is the extent to which these fires resonate beyond the immediately affected areas. A relatively small and exceptionally mountainous country, with a number of natural bottlenecks, it is easily crippled. The fires in Athens have cut off the main north-south highway leading to Thessaloniki. A fire near ancient Olympia, site of the first Olympic Games, has cut the largest road through the Peloponnese. In Euboea, where the coast guard rescued more than 600 peoplethe landscape is so rugged and the destruction so prolific that the sea has become one of the few means of escape.
A constant stream of emergency push alerts keeps people on their toes. “Extreme danger of fires in the coming days. Avoid any action that could cause a fire. Access to forests and wooded areas is prohibited. Avoid unnecessary travel,” warned one of the messages I received. Tens of thousands of people were ordered to evacuate their homes last week.
So far, two people have been reported dead, a merciful change from 2018, when fires on the coast of Attica, the region that includes Athens, killed more than 100 people. However, this may underestimate the broader impact. The health consequences will be serious, with hundreds of Greeks already hospitalized for smoke inhalation. Thousands more have had their COVID-19 vaccination appointments canceled – the state has had to temporarily close some vaccination centers due to fire risks, just as the Delta variant increases the number of cases of COVID-19.
After decades of steady depopulation, which reduced thousands of villages to ghost communities of crumbling houses and mostly elderly residents, it is also the last thing much of rural Greece needs. The loss of even small plots of agricultural land can be devastating to some of the few left to work the land.
More importantly, in a country both defined by and dependent on its history (tourism is vital to the Greek economy), these fires threaten some of the most important heritage sites. In an interview with me early last year, the head of a new government commission on the impact of climate change on antiquities identified wildfires as the biggest threat to cities like Olympia, which seems having narrowly survived last week after several other close encounters. last years.
“Fires and floods, which get worse when you lose trees, will become even more problematic,” said Constantinos Cartalis, a professor at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. “That’s what should worry us all.”
Last summer, a forest fire was subdued by the time it reached the outer walls of the ruins of Mycenae, a center of ancient Greek civilization.
It is a measure of Greece’s extraordinary cultural wealth that, fleeing the fire in the early hours of Friday, we passed Lakes Stymphale and Nemea, supposed scenes of two of the labors of Hercules, and well over a dozen archaeological sites, all in half an hour. No matter where a Greek fire burns, it inevitably threatens a heritage of global importance.
Friday evening, a cool westerly wind finally brought temperatures down, bringing some respite, especially to those without electricity. But for the firefighters, this was not a good thing. Standing atop Lycabettus, the steep, wooded hill in central Athens, I watched the strengthening breeze fan a new fire in a northern suburb and carry smoke from the Peloponnese across the sea south beyond of the Acropolis. The sky glowed orange.
Below, the normally bustling city seemed strangely subdued. If this is the new normal, it will take a long time to adjust to it.
