One year after Greece’s record-breaking fires: “A way of life gone up in flames”
Source: NEOS KOSMOS
A narrow dirt road winds its way to the vineyards of Kyriaki Hatzisavva, at the outskirts of Alexandroupoli in Evros, Greece’s borderline region with Turkey.
The flanks of the hills are still as black as a year ago, like a mourning veil.
Amidst the vineyard, a single olive tree offers shelter from the sun. Most of the vines did not survive the fire, leaving a just a few to sprout again.
“You can clearly see how the flames jumped from one place to another,” says Hatzisavva, pointing to the hilltops.
“Only a small patch of greenery below has escaped unscathed. Behind them, the same picture, a blackened landscape from the sea up to Soufli, almost fifty kilometres further inland.”
Unstoppable blaze
On 19 August 2023, a fire broke out in the village of Melia. The fire brigade got control over it, but flames spread to two other places. The timing could not have been worse. Like this year, Greece was suffering from a persistent heatwave and prolonged drought.
The meltemi summer wind, blew hot air from east to west, driving both fire fronts together into an uncontrollable inferno.
For 17 days Evros burned in the largest wildfire ever recorded in Europe.
Some 96,600 hectares (966.000 m2) of land went up in flames, including a large part of Dadia forest. Twenty people, all of them refugees, caught up on the route from Turkey to Greece, lost their lives.
Hatzisavva simply cannot forget those days.
“The fire started about 25 kilometres away. I immediately had a bad gut feeling.
“The army had sealed off the hills, but I managed to reach my vineyard through the back roads. First, I tried to plough the grass fields to improvise buffer, but the bone-dry ground was hard as concrete. My cousin, a farmer as well, was nearby, evacuating his sheep.
“Suddenly the fire was everywhere. I tried to get the dogs together, but they were nowhere to be seen. I got away just in time. The next day I came back […] When I saw that the vinery had been spared, and the dogs were still alive, I burst into tears.”
Brown sludg
Hatzisavva had witnessed fires before, but not of this size and intensity.
“Problems have been going on for a long time. In 2022, not a drop of rain fell during spring and summer.”
A day after the interview, rain comes in the region.
Not the gentle type of rain the scorched soil was so desperate for, but a summer violent storm.
In barely five minutes, water gushes down the slopes, racing downwards. Shortly after, the drainage channels near Alexandroupoli spew brown sludge into the sea with an immense force, carrying branches, stumps, and the occasional whole tree with it.
The sudden downpour has free rein, without trees and shrubs to hold soil in place. Forest topsoil, slowly built up through years of growth and decay cycles, is lost in a few hours.
It is difficult to predict the impact of a changing climate, says Hatzisavva.
“But I refuse to accept that this will be the new normal. I will replant everything, even if it takes years.”
Despite her determination, a sense of loss prevails.
“I used to roam these hills with my grandfather while herding his goats. I want to teach my daughters the paths. But nothing remains of these places.”
The goat paradox
Climate change aside, there are more factors rendering Greece prone to wildfires.
Budgets for forest management and firefighting were slashed during austerity years, while prevention and forest maintenance remain underfunded.
Mediterranean forests tolerate fires. In fact, they are integral to their regeneration cycle. But the disappearance of traditional forest management practices has taken its roll.
Forests like those in Evros are particularly vulnerable, explains Theodora Skartsi, an ecologist and manager of the Society for the Protection of Biodiversity of Thrace.
She works at Dadia Natural Park, a vast forested area known for its populations of prey birds, including vultures.
“Dadia, and by extension all forests in the region, are a result of human activity. They consist of a patchwork stitching together Mediterranean oaks forests, native black pine, pines plantations, and open meadows. In recent decades, the forest undergrowth has increased significantly, and this has led to changing fire patterns.”
Forests are growing denser due to the mass exodus from the Greek countryside and the decline of livestock farming.
While in many places in Greece goat farming is notorious for overgrazing, undergrazing is an issue in Evros, according to Skartsi.
“Native wildlife like deer cannot compensate, and manually removing dense undergrowth over such a vast area is simply impossible for the already understaffed forest management.”
Skartsi says the disaster extends beyond the forest. The entire region was affected by the wildfires.
“Dadia and other villages in central Evros have been losing inhabitants for decades. Now the collective trauma of the fire has been added up to the economic decline […] depriving Evros of job opportunities in nature tourism, desperately needed to save villages from abandonment.”
“A shred of your soul”
That sense of abandonment hangs palpably over Kirki.
The village, nestled on a mountainside 20 kilometers away from Alexandroupoli, is a natural gem, but completely deserted.
Theodoros Eleftheriadis, a spry septuagenarian raised in Germany who returned to Kirki as an adult to live with his mother, recalls the days when the village was full of life.
“Twenty years ago, about 400 people lived here, there was a school, a police station. Now only 40 permanent residents remain, mainly elderly.”
Kirki was badly affected by the fire, as the black hills testify.
“The meltemi drove the flames in our direction.
“At some point, the fire brigade was called to Alexandroupoli to save the city’s hospital, while Kirki was evacuated,” Eleftheriadis recounts.
He returned to Kirki immediately after the fire, finding his home vanished.
“You can’t possibly understand if you haven’t lived through it. A house is so much more than stones, it’s a living place, a place full of memories. It’s like losing a piece of your soul.”
Eleftheriadis knew the forests around Kirki like the back of his hand. He single-handedly created a network of footpaths and immediately after the fires started cleaning them and restoring signage.
“I feel a strong connection to this place. I see it as my duty to remain hopeful. Nature will recover from this blow. Whether Kirki will get back on its feet is another question.”
“New reality forced upon us”
Eight years ago, Georgios Hatzigeorgiou moved to Avantas.
It was love at first sight; one he was keen to share with others. Elected community president, he started a project to open the village forests to hikers and climbers.
“We worked for four years on a network of hiking trails and climbing routes. We were ready to start receiving visitors, school excursions,… And then this happened. Our forests, hopes, plans…everything went up in smoke.”
It was a close call for Avantas. The fire encircled the village.
“When it became clear that the flames were coming our way, I gathered people to save what could be saved. People who knew the forest well, or with agricultural equipment. The fire brigade was busy elsewhere, we were on our own.”
Locals rushed to cut down a piece of pine forest around the village.
“Otherwise, the fire would have spread to the houses,” Hatzigeorgiou explains.
“It was like hell on earth.”
Now, a year later, living in the aftermath of the fires remains a tough task.
“For months, an intense smell of ash lingered over our village. Even now, the wind still brings that smell sometimes. From day one, we were forced into a new dark reality.”
He believes that the forest will recover eventually.
“But if the land burns again in the next decade, it is over. The forest cannot cope with that. What worries me most is the lack of water. It rains less and less, but people don’t seem to be aware of that.”
Grim future for beekeeping
The botanical knowledge of beekeeper Giannis Kalogiantsidis is impressive.
As if it were a menu, he lists the flora his bees feast on.
“I would bring my beehives up to the mountains at the end of February. In spring, almond trees, Greek strawberry trees, acacias, and field elms bloom, in addition to a wide variety of spring flowers. Later, in the summer months, oak blossoms, later heathen. All that wealth was wiped out in a few days.”
Kalogiantsidis represents the Evros beekeepers’ association. In total he and his colleagues lost around 1600 hives in the fire.
But the real disaster came later: loss of worker bees, lack of nectar and pollen, and persistent drought killing off many more colonies.
“I can’t give an exact number, but about 10,000 hives perished.”
He sees little future for beekeeping in the region.
“Some flowers and low shrubs are growing again, but the trees are gone, at least for a decade. They were the main source of food for bees.”
Despite promises made, Kalogiantsidis does not count on government support.
“They simply have no interest in beekeeping. The official compensation for each hive lost in the fires is 65 euros. A joke. Many people simply do not understand the importance of bees.”
Generations’ work lost within hours
Even a year later, it remains difficult for Dimitris Adamidis to look at what the fire did to Konos, his family’s olive grove named after the surrounding hills.
“Out of 3,000 olive trees, only fifteen have come out of the fire unscathed. Some spots are not more than a graveyard of trees.”
His family has been growing Makri olives, an ancient local variety, for four generations.
However, recent years have been difficult due to persistent heat and drought.
“Olive trees are resilient, but even the Makri variety yields little under such conditions. We were forced to harvest earlier in the year, and […] resorted to harvesting at night, to protect the aroma of olives from the heat.”
Any harvest is out of question for the near future.
“In a few hours, the work of generations went in flames. The grove could have been saved, but the fire brigade chose to intervene elsewhere,” he says commenting on the “anything but adequate” response by authorities.
Overwhelmingly, the community sentiment is that the government fails to take the threat of wildfires seriously.
Lost in a new landscape
The sense of displacement that resounds so strongly through these locals’ stories is best described by a term coined by Australian philosopher Glenn Albrecht.
Albrecht introduced the neologism while researching on distress caused by environmental changes in open-pit mining areas in New South Wales.
Formed by the Latin word solacium (comfort) and the Greek root -algos (pain), solastalgia encapsulates the loss of identity, memory and knowledge linked to a drastically altered landscape, the mourning for a world that was.
Solastalgia accurately describes the local sentiment nestling in Evros, amidst blackened land.
“For more than a month after the fire, I avoided the hills. I couldn’t bring myself to face this disaster.” Adamidis says.
“When I first drove towards Alexandroupoli through the charred forest, I pulled over and burst into tears,” he adds, pausing for a moment.
“I’m an optimistic person, really. But everyone has their limits. Everything that made this place unique has been reduced to ashes. And I’m scared that whatever is left will follow suit.”
*Toon Lambrechts is a Belgian journalist based in Thessaloniki. This is a translated edited version of the article published in the Dutch environmental magazine Down to Earth.
The original article: belongs to NEOS KOSMOS .
