Wu Wei

Getting to the root cause of the forest fires in Greece

Incredible that an EU country still doesn't have a land register or land use zoning and can get away with "planning by fire".

Politicians to blame
Editorial

Kathimerini Greece
ATHENS

Last week's forest fires in Rafina and Voutza have left great destruction and devastation in their wake. One of Attica's few remaining greenbelt areas has been lost, in addition to private property. As this is not the first time something like this has happened, the reaction should not simply be an account of the damages and a search for the perpetrators.

Of course this must done, but if we are truly interested in digging deeper to find the real causes of the crime, if we want to think about the future, then the investigation will also have to be political. It should uncover and deal with those weaknesses in the system that open the way for arsonists and others who would destroy the Greek environment.

As this newspaper commented the day after the fire, the first piece of evidence of political "guilt" regarding the destruction of Greece's forests can be traced to the state's failure to implement the law. Not only are inspections perfunctory - where they exist at all - not only are the penalties too light to act as any deterrent, but every so often special laws are passed that vindicate land-grabbers en masse. In the midst of such chaos, it is not difficult for arsonists to exploit the situation, particularly where "local communities" care more about finding more land to build upon than in protecting their surroundings.

The country's political administration is the only truly guilty party. It no longer has any excuse. Given the availability of modern firefighting equipment and methods, even technical difficulties can no longer be cited, so that even if we don't know what was happening in 1930, it was quite obvious in 1990. Yet despite all the means at the authorities' disposal, the country still doesn't have a land register. Land use classifications are still not determined and, above all, there is no security before the law. The law-abiding are afraid that they could lose their property, while those who break the law are hoping to get whatever they want.

The conclusions to be drawn regarding the achievements of Greece's politicians are truly overwhelming. On the one hand, we have delays and administrative incompetence, on the other, there is the inability to establish land use classifications that won't change every now and then according to the desires of interest groups and partisan expediencies.

This is where Greece still appears to be a Third World country, and only has its leaders to blame. Unfortunately, there are no encouraging signs giving us hope that things might change.

http://info.ekathimerini.com/4dcgi/news/content.asp?aid=934479

© 2005 Kathimerini

Only in Greece!!

Arsonists set blaze
PM says new trees will be planted as damage assessment begins

Kathimerini Greece
ATHENS

As the effort began yesterday to clean up and record the damage done by a massive fire that swept through parts of eastern Attica on Thursday, burning thousands of trees and dozens of homes, the government said that the blaze had been the work of arsonists.

The fire began near the port of Rafina on Thursday morning and spread to other areas east of Athens. Nearly 1,000 firefighters and soldiers managed to extinguish the dying embers of the fire early yesterday morning, but not before it had blazed through up to 750 hectares of land, some 350 hectares of which was forested, burned down at least 60 homes and damaged another 40. Some 45 cars and an unknown number of animals were also caught in the flames.

Prime Minister Costas Karamanlis met with his close aides yesterday morning to assess the situation and announced afterward that the task of recording the damage would begin straight away. Military aircraft began taking aerial photographs of the afflicted area. The government said the images would be made public next week so people could make sure for themselves that nobody would build on the burnt land in the future.

Karamanlis said that the entire area would be reforested, therefore making it illegal for anyone to build there. "Every citizen... will be able to check that the state carries out its promises and that wherever there was forest, trees will grow again," he said.

Meanwhile, Public Order Minister Giorgos Voulgarakis backed claims from local officials and residents that arsonists were to blame for the fire. "There are strong indications that it was a case of arson," he said "The fires started on many fronts at the same time, and spread in a pattern that could not simply be due to the direction of the wind." The fire brigade agreed with the minister's assessment.

An Athens prosecutor, Epaminondas Vrakatselis, launched an investigation into the cause of the fire. Local municipalities, meanwhile, began offering afflicted residents emergency payments of up to 600 euros. Those who had their main residence damaged in the fire will be given temporary prefabricated homes by the government, which promised to compensate those affected by the blaze.

http://info.ekathimerini.com/4dcgi/news/content.asp?aid=934469
© 2005 Kathimerini

But like many other times before, the Government does not keep its promises and illegal constructions will appear, as the arsonists' backers will build quickly on the cleared land.

Winds, goblins, fires and tornados

Winds
Signs in Athens already that July is passing into August: the meltemi is blowing, creating huge spirals of dust, drying out everyone's gardens, smashing everything it can reach through open windows but reducing the temperatures in the afternoon and evening. The Meltemi wind was known by the old Greeks as the Etesian northern winds, and results from a high pressure system laying over the Balkan/Hungary area and a relatively low pressure system over Turkey.

Although this katabatic wind can bring about harsh sailing conditions it also provides cooling, low humidity and good visibility. Furthermore, it can be characterized as one of the few Mediterranean winds that do not necessarily die out at the end of the day and can easily last more than three to six days. more

The most famous katabatic wind in Europe is the Mistral, which blows down the Rhône valley in southern France and out into the Mediterranean. It can become a very strong wind reaching speeds of 80 miles an hour as it funnels down over the Rhône delta and is generally at its strongest in winter and early spring, unlike the meltemi which blows in July and August.

When the Mistral blows, it sets most people on edge or gives them migraine, maybe due to lack of sleep, caused by the howling noise it makes gusting up to 120 km/h onto a provençal tiled roof. The dry cold air blows hard and evenly, leaving the sky clear and tinged in an unbelievably luminous blue colour unique to Provence, the air is brisk and the sunshine is harsh and blinding. In the summertime, a day of Mistral is enough to make the soup-warm Mediterranean drop to the serving temperature of vichyssoise more .

More colloquial is the Provençal name of 'le vent du fada', or "the idiot wind", so-called because the Mistral is believed to be more than capable of driving even the sanest weather scientist to gibbering insanity ...more. I'm sure. Given my own manic tendencies I was interested to see how the meltemi affected me, but it seems I'm immune. A little howling is a small price to pay to sleep with the shutters open and a steadily lowering temperature.

Goblins
The meltemi also howls at night making it difficult to sleep. It reminds me of winter nights in our Brecon home where suddenly outside the front door I heard goblins howling intermittently. I went all round the house looking for the source of the noise, which eventually I convinced myself was coming from the vibrations of a strip of metal draughtstripping newly installed round the door lock. I was never really convinced by this piece of detective work, prefering the goblin theory which the sound seemed to match rather than the unromantic science. But when we moved the door to another location in the house and the goblins moved too, I had to give it more credit.

I always like to imagine this is the sound that Pushkin means in his poem Demons, where returning from on a winter evening his sleigh is caught in a blizzard and the driver feels they are being led astray by demons howling in the wind.

Fires
At the same time, helicopters are to be seen overhead towing huge bags of sand or water to put out forest fires which inevitably start at this time of year. The Greek evening news was full of news of houses just outside Athens destroyed by fire.

Tornados
Actually we had put on BBC World News to hear about the tornado in Birmingham reported by the BBC which seemed to have ripped through the areas we used to live in. But this did not appear on the news, only the Greek forest fires.

Yet another case lately where it seems that the UK is not the safest place to live. But neither are the outskirts of Athens, or for that matter the outskirts of Vilnius where one summer there were forest fires for several days creating a smoggy atmosphere over the whole city.

Mealtimes in different countries

Went down to the work canteen to try to zap my brain into action while reading a boring report. The canteen does excellent coffee so I sat in a corner waiting for the expresso to take action. The canteen is also a good place to bump into people, so I had a quick "catch up" meeting with the IT chief when he appeared.

However I noticed that the canteen was filling up with people having their lunch and it was only 11.15. My body clock still works on Greek time, feeling it is too hot for lunch until 3pm or if very hot not until 11pm. Last weekend we just ate fruit during the day it was so hot. Meals at 11pm are not really very sensible for digestion, but what can you do now the 2 hour lunch break or even the siesta has been abolished, and you have to work normal hours. Once or twice in my first summer working in Athens I ventured out at lunch time to have a normal break, then learned better. Later I just managed to run across the street for a sandwich or cheese pie and then dashed back to the airconditioning. Once the workaholic habit had set in (like all my Greek colleagues) I never did manage to get out to explore the part of the city round my office.

Here in Kosovo, work starts at around 8am (not 7 as in Hungary or Lithuania in the power plants or factories), so 11 is a bit early for lunch. I decided it must be due to the small size of the canteen and the larger number of staff. Eating early is obviously better if you get the best food. And they seem to have some sort of luncheon voucher presumably with a subsidised lunch. The menu is rather limited, especially with a no-fat diet (I am known as the lady with the sandwich, no cheese) but at maximum 2 euros, what westerner could complain.

Literary parties Greek style

This email arrived from one of the Athens English language book shops.

"If you're in Athens I'll be here at the new shop, Nikodimou 5. On the 15th of July at 11 pm we'll have a Harry Potter Party to celebrate the publication of the the new HP title after midnight"

No literary lunch this one. I guess Bee would just about be up in time for it, though she has perhaps grown out of Harry Potter.

Home from home

At the weekend I like to sit out on the balcony when I have done the shopping and read the expat newspaper Athens News.

Bee likes it because it has the movie schedule for all of Athens. I like it for the serious political and economic news, though this is a bit one-sided since it comes from the English language version of I Kathimerini (conservative) which I also get daily by email. But Athens News also has good columnists who supply more detail on the latest scandals. This week's articles are about sewage, pensions and strikes (again) though Eirineos has now gone off the boil.

We both like it for the more domestic issues of cooking, gardening, restaurants and tourism: suggestions on where to go in the islands. Lately they are venturing further afield with their suggestions, and have included Turkey.

But even I was surprised to see this week's feature on Baltic (yes Baltic not Balkan) capitals. It's very expensive and not very convenient to get there by air from Athens, unless there are new flights. Before at least you could get there via Warsaw, Prague or Vienna, and with long waits. Nibbles the cat arrived having explored Warsaw waiting lounge, out of boredom. I suppose Easyjet via Berlin is alson now an option.

The picture of Vilnius is not very exciting. Instead of all the picturesque churches and city squares, there is a view from the open air restaurant in Uzupis overlooking the river. Since the visit was made at Easter the benches are empty. I remember the restaurant best from May 1 2004, when I was there for the EU entry celebrations. The EU Delegation held a party, the weather was sunny and then we all went down to the Cathedral for the midnight countdown to entry.

It would be good if Greeks could go to Vilnius and open some real Greek restaurants. Vilnius In Your Pocket online version mentions two. I remember visiting the first one and ordering tsatsiki which came made with varske (cottage cheese) not yoghurt (no natural yoghurt available in Lithuania much) - absolutely disgusting!. The spanokopita I was looking forward to (no filo pastry either) took a long time to come, and when it did it was clear why. It's resemblance to a spinach and cheese pizza from the local pizza delivery service could not have been accidental. The decor itself was more Roman and Egyptian than classical Greek and anything less like the traditional taverna it was hard to find. We had arranged to meet another family there and when they arrived late the father (a Greek) marched straight into the kitchen to see what was good. The owner, unused to this traditional method of inspecting the menu, marched him straight out again. In Your Pocket has only this to say: "you won't find one single potato in the building. A Lithuanian first?".

The other restaurant was notable only for the novelty of a place to drink Metaxa.

But Greeks could also visit Vilnius to see the Acropolis, a bizarrely named out of town shopping mall, which was claimed to be the biggest in the Baltics. Certainly it was big enough for us, though the shops were duplicates of those already in town. It is open late in the evening helped by a big supermarket, ice rink, multiscreen cinema and a food court. At first it seemed people just came to look rather than spend, even with coach tours from Belarus to look at the wonders of capitalism. But since it is already expanding and a new one is opening in Kaunas, it is obviously profitable.

Athens has nothing like this, large shops being limited to a few branches of Carrefour but no real malls. This is partly because of the labour laws severely restricting shopping hours. No shops except those serving tourists are open on Sundays. The Government is currently trying to change this to attract foreign investment and create jobs, but of course the unions, as always more concerned about existing jobs than future ones, are resisting.

On my way back from Kosovo on Friday I spotted what looked like a shopping mall outside Thessaloniki. Saloniki was first to get IKEA. I wonder if the hinterland of the Western Balkans, (Belgrade, Skopje, Pristina and Sarajevo, served by a fast road as far as Skopje at least), is considered more of a market than Athens.

In any case a trip by some Greeks to "New Europe" would open some eyes as to what 10 years of economic transition can do, when Greece has yet to throw off the worst of socialism.

Greeks celebrating

Every now and then our Greek neighbours in the street near us have a party. Loud (and I mean disco levels) music fills the streets around and since we all have our windows and doors open from the heat, even at midnight there is no escape.

Usually the music is rather interesting, of the sad blues type associated with refugees from Asia Minor in the 1920s, called rembetika. Over seventy-five years ago, in the slums of Piraeus and Athens, two distinct musical styles began to merge: the rembetika music of the outcasts and outlaws of mainland Greece and the smyrneika of the Christian refugees from Asia Minor.

However tonight it is just regular pop of the Eurovision variety so rather dull. What is interesting is the constant sound of smashing plates.

These biscuit packets seemed irresistible

These biscuit packets seemed irresistible in the shop. The picture of mother (or maybe grandma, but she isn’t in black) and daughter mixing the biscuits in a big bowl in the open air seemed so convincing that they were going to be good.

And so they were, the orange ones very orangey and the savoury ones (thyme and lemon and peppers) rather peppery. I had to eat them up quick once the packet was open. Unfortunately some were broken, but this gave another excuse to finish them off.

Even the bag itself, with its foil lining, was satisfactorily bulging.

Sewage crisis deepens

This headline in Athens News must be intended as a joke!

Above it is a photo of Eirinaios with the headline:

His laity, his bishops and his peers have told him to go. His passion may have just begun.

Whether they meant it or not, he is surely in the shit with the whole Greek Orthodox Church over a deal with the Israelis over land in Jerusalem. Not that the rest of the Church is whiter than white with scandals in Greek over bishops involved in trial fixing and links with drug dealers.

The headline is actually about a new environmental mess:

Repeated protests from the people of Piraeus ... against a proposed method of sewage treatment on the island of Psyttaleia forced Attica's water treatment company EYDAP to scrap plans to build a plant for volatilisation on the island. The method would have burned solid waste into greenhouse gases, leaving a dry cake that could be used as a combustible in industrial furnaces.

Doesn't Greece have a plan to reduce greenhouse gases as part of the EU's commitment to Kyoto? Silly me, of course it doesn't. So greenhouse gases are not a problem!

It seems that the plant to do this greenhouse gas production is only at the experimental stage (??) and would not have got environmental permits. Surprise, surprise.

So the production of 700 tons of sewage sludge per day will continue, which is being illegally stored on the island and impractical or possibly dangerous (???) to dump it at the local landfill. (!!!) The drying facility might be ready by 2007 according to the Minister. Yet another bad use of EU funds which no doubt might have to be repaid.

This is going to be a very difficult summer for Pireaus because of the stench.

says the Pireas Prefect.

But isn't Pireas the main port for ferries, with millions of tourist passing through? A good job it isn't the year of the Olympics.

It gets worse: sludge already dumped in the Ano Liosia landfill has been causing landslides. Dumping was stopped until recently when the amount of sludge at Psyttaleia was threatening to overflow into the Saronic Sea and cause large damage to the local ecosystem.

The problem has arisen because Greece is already seriously in the shit with the EU over requirements to provide proper waste disposal instead of having lots of illegal dumping. NIMBYs are preventing the establishment of large landfill sites, which does not stop us all having to put up with everyone dumping their waste, especially building rubble on any empty piece of land. As for the rest of what is dumped out of sight, who knows what is really going on where.

Animals have better hygienic arrangements than humans, and manage not to foul their own homes.

ADSL at last!

Just when we had decided that we couldn't stand living in a country without a proper internet connection, and we had to move!

DSL has been progressing slowly in the richer areas of Athens but hadn't reached us. With both of us on line and a dodgy ISDN connection we spent a fortune on local phone calls to the internet. We have checked regularly on the web whether our number is allowed to connect, but always the answer has been to wait.

Suddenly this evening we got a phone call from the phone company, wanting to tell us about the joys of DSL. I cut her short: just tell us how much and when. Now it seems we are signed up and the kit will come in 3 days. Of course this is Greece, so there will be problems.

However J has just got DSL too, and so we can borrow her husband to help set it up.

And TV man thinks he might try to get Dutch TV again for us.

Tried to get the wireless card working again on my laptop, but no hardware support in Greece. Long pointless phone calls to Belgium and then probably it will have to go to France for repair for 10 days. We decided that it could wait till August as it might clash with trips to Kosovo in June.

But now important to sort it out. Will try again with wireless USB lurking somewhere.