Nestled inside the rocks high above the frothing Aegean Sea, our vacation house in Mykonos is hardly a communication command centre. Cell phones ignore their roaming signals, computer links are laborious, cordless phones ring persistently and are never located let alone answered. A current newspaper is purchased only on organized shopping expeditions and the satellite television control is set, in fact jammed, at Cartoon Network. Yet the terrifying news of the Greek fires did manage to infiltrate our world last Saturday morning seeping through the white plaster walls like the smoke that has engulfed this beautiful country for a week now.
The morning phone call to my mother informed me. Greece is on fire, what are we going to do to save our "patrida" (fatherland)? Normally calm, she was deeply sad. Then my mother-in-law called anxiously. She lives alone in the pine-forested resort of Porto Rafti, south east of Athens. Should she try to dampen her dried out garden and the scrubland around her or return to the capital, itself a smoldering cauldron of cement sidewalks and buildings lying cramped under the stifling cloud of smoke from fires on the surrounding mountains?
Our 10-year-old triplets temporarily forgot the Powder Puff girls and instead were transfixed by the news, which as is typical in Greece, combined sensational footage with melodramatic headlines and totally inappropriate musical bursts. For once reality eventually proved more horrific than its media coverage. Images were clouded by a gray soup of haze. Young and old, lithe and unfit inhabitants escaped from their houses only to desperately run back to them hurling water at the fire from hoses but mostly from little bottles. Futile yet so understandable.
We could not reach Elena Oikonomidou, our nanny, until later that day. She had gone with a furniture truck to move into her new holiday house in Kakovatos, near Zaharo on the west coast of the Peloponnese, the three peninsulae of southern Greece which along with the large island of Evia, west of Athens, were worst affected. Communications were impossible, telephone networks either burnt or unable to function in this ethnic inferno, goaded on by the usual high winds of August and three months of searing heat and no rain.
Every summer there are forest fires, some started by accidental cigarette butts, others by more malevolent sparks. Forest land is protected by law and you cannot build on it. However once it is razed and the case for it churns through the sluggish Greek legal system, there's a chance it can be built on.
Was it expertly coordinated arson this time which foiled an undermanned and weakly organized firefighting force? Arrests have been made, rewards for information offered, but our eagerness to find out is dimmed by horror and disbelief. Our newspapers are full of the discovery of a mother burnt to death sheltering her four children beneath her body. Three nights ago on television, I watched a lone firefighter defying a molten wall of flame with a hosepipe. He rushed forward, then staggered back behind a bush where he succumbed.
Elena told us that with the mother who died with her children in the village of Artemida, a man who had just been made an agrofilakas (land custodian) a week before also was burnt to death. Beside these bodies, traces of human fat were visible on the ground. In next door Smerna a charred donkey still stood upright. Elena's village of Kakovatos meaning literally "difficult to pass through" proved its name right. The fire was diverted before it reached there, crackling some 200 meters or 300 feet from Elena's new dream house. After witnessing the destruction around her she joined the whole neighborhood for a night on the wide, thankfully treeless beach where a sea coated with cinders lapped listlessly at their feet. No one slept. For three days and nights, a biblical plague of ash sprinkled the area. Everyone kept watch.
This part of Greece is little known to tourists. You cannot easily fly or sail there. You have to drive along twisting roads that slice through gray-green olive groves and orchards. Inaccessible, it has none of the sometimes offensive and always invasive tourist infrastructure which sustains the preferred tourist hubs on islands like Corfu, Crete, Rhodes, Mykonos or Santorini. Instead it has the rural, rolling loveliness of Provence or Tuscany. Or rather it had.
Yannis Kourelas is a native of Archaia Pissa, a village in the shadow of Ancient Olympia, too small to appear on even the most scrupulous map. From Thursday August 23, the flames approached the area even though there were several opportunities to extinguish them which were missed. "Because of poor organization"? I asked gingerly. "Because of no organization" was his stifled reply, his voice grazed by smoke and heartbreak. "We had no help." On Saturday August 25 at 5 p.m., the fire came from Olympia. At 10:30 p.m. one fire truck arrived. Villagers across the region were calling television channels for help as authorities would not or could not answer the phones. One man burnt to death, 17 homes and the taverna were destroyed. The surrounding pine forest is gone and the fire even charred the banks of the river Alfios. The people of Archaia Pissa still have no drinking water.
In Ancient Olympia, the lawn of the stadium burnt and the flames reached the Olympic Academy (the ancient seat of athletic education) whose fire prevention system failed to work owing to a power cut caused by the fire itself.
In the western and central Peloponnese, fire has destroyed green. In the peninsula's southern tip of Mani, there were only rocks to burn. The region which first raised the flag of revolution against the Turks in 1821 is famous for its stark aesthetic and relentless people. People who last week extinguished the fire not with water which they didn't have, but with the earth and with their clothes. The castellated towers that punctuate Mani's harsh landscape are now charred and smoldering. My daughter's godfather is from Areopolis, the capital there. His brother Jimmy had just gone on holiday for a few days to swim and recover from a broken leg. When the temperature soared inside the house, he stumbled outside to find the pomegranate trees on fire around the house which thankfully was not damaged. He limped to safety to an aunt's house. Others were not so lucky. A 60-year-old neighbor who had just set up a small hotel died in the blaze there along with six others.
In a country where hospitality is sacrosanct, support and generosity have sprouted rapidly. Several telemarathons to raise donations are scheduled for next week. The unwieldy process of government compensation is under way and private funds are in place. Elections are on September 16th and until then the economic and ecological trauma will be assessed, discussed and exploited by panels of consternated faces in little boxes on our TV screens. As happens often here, everyone knows what to do, everyone saw it coming. However unfortunately for the ravaged forests and cavernous shells of houses and lives no one prevented it nor stopped it efficiently and promptly enough.
This damaged land was the verdant core of Greece where more people were settling and even very slightly helping to ease the frenetic pressure of life in Athens, where over four million of a total population of 11 million live. Our small but resilient country doesn't need any more political arguments but instead economic support, environmental regeneration and that most restorative gift of all, human tenderness.
The fires that the world witnessed should not douse our spirit nor diminish our energy to recover. After all despite their intensity the fires could not and could never extinguish the Olympic flame.