Hundreds of wildfires have plagued Greece over the summer, adding to a list of European countries set ablaze during record-breaking late summer heat waves as global temperatures continue to rise.
Evros, in the North-East region of Greece, sits along the most popular route for migrants crossing the River Evros from Turkey to the European Union. Reports surfaced on August 22 that 18 burned bodies believed to be migrants were discovered near the Evros capital city, Alexandroupolis. While the country continued to fight the infernos into early September, on Rhodes Island, residents were still grappling with the fallout from a twelve-day-long fight against wildfires in late July that left parts of the island completely devastated.
First reports of the inferno on Rhodes came on July 18, when strong winds accelerated the spread of fires in the island’s eastern and southern regions. At the time, Eleni Diacogiannis Pelekanos, 60, and her husband Vasili Pelekanos, 60, were at their home in the mountainside village of Asklipio. They had planned to wait out the fires there, hoping the flames would pass by the village like they had in years before, but they didn’t this time. Church bells ringing in the night signaled an emergency evacuation as the rapidly approaching flames began to encircle the village.
The couple had little time to prepare or pack for the evacuation. “We just ran,” said Eleni. They proceeded down the mountain to the nearest town, Kiotari, where they slept on the beach for three days and watched as Asklipio was engulfed in flames. While evacuation efforts were underway 38 miles away in Rhodes City, where 19,000 tourists and residents were moved from homes and hotels, causing the largest evacuation undertaken by the country. For some residents of Rhodes, Vasili said, there was “No help to bring something, for three days, no food, nothing.”
Residents of Asklipio and Kiotari who spoke with The Real News said they received little assistance from Rhodes’ government with putting out the forest fires. Instead, they relied on the work of volunteer firefighters like Emanuel Pelekanos, one of Eleni and Vasili’s three sons. Throughout the nearly two-week battle, Emanuel worked to put out as many fires and save as many lives and homes as possible. But one fire he could not put out was in the house of his recently deceased paternal grandmother, Olympia Pelekanos.
Church bells ringing in the night signaled an emergency evacuation as the rapidly approaching flames began to encircle the village.
Olympia Pelekanos was gifted her house as part of her wedding dowry in the early 1950s. From the outside, with just one story and three rooms, the home was pretty ordinary looking. Inside, however, it was filled with memories and belongings accrued over the course of an entire lifetime; it was one of the last pieces of Olympia that her family could hold onto, after she died of old age seven months ago. It was there, in that house, that Vasili Pelekanos was born, learned to speak and walk for the first time, and played with his younger sister, Irena, through the years.
Vasili and Eleni Diacogiannis Pelekanos, an Australian-raised Greek whose family was from Asklipio, were married at his mother’s home in 1983. They worked in the Rhodes’ travel industry, Eleni as a travel agent and Vasili working in hotels, up until they both retired in recent years. While they were raising two sons in the village where Vasili was born, family dinners and holidays were always hosted at Olympia’s home.
But everything changed when the forest fires that began on Rhodes spread in the over 100-degree heat. The fires even led Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis to tell Parliament that the country was “at war” with the inferno.
When the fires in their area ended on July 28, Vasili and Eleni returned to Asklipio. They found Olympia’s home destroyed. “My son saved a lot of houses, but he cannot save the house,” Vasili said, referring to his mother’s home.
Olympia’s home now sits in ruins. Her family believes it will cost at least 100,000 euros to repair all of its damages—money that they currently do not have. “It feels like we are living in a country at war. It feels like we are in Ukraine,” Eleni said as she walked through the wreckage. Indeed, the devastation appeared like that caused by manufactured weapons, not by a natural disaster. The home’s entrance, windows, roof, and back wall are all blasted with large, gaping holes.
“Thank God [Olympia] wasn’t here to see her house has been destroyed. She loved [that house] and she had a lot of stuff in it. And everything was destroyed. There’s nothing left,” said Eleni as she surveyed the charred remains, her voice breaking.
The only item remaining intact was a single white plate with blue flowers, sitting on a ledge above what used to be the fireplace. Though covered in ash, it had managed to stay in its place, unscathed, as the house was swallowed by flames and leveled to the ground.
When the fires in their area ended on July 28, Vasili and Eleni returned to Asklipio. They found Olympia’s home destroyed.
While Eleni spoke about the conditions of the home, what was left of it, her husband waited outside. It was too hard for him to step into the home to see that his family’s history had been destroyed. “Do you want to come in?” she asked at one point, to which Vasili replied with a sigh, “What is there to see? There is nothing left.”
Workers from the Rhodes government recently came to the house to assess the damages and determine whether or not they could cover some of the losses. But Eleni said that the officials who visited them deemed the house repairable, meaning that they think the family can fix it. Eleni told TRNN that the government offered her no money to help with those repairs.
Eleni and Vasili’s family are not the only ones who have had their lives upended by the wildfires. Back in Kiotari, the couple’s friend John Tsangaris, 75, has been left homeless after the fires razed to the ground the two-story home he had built himself 30 years earlier. “I don’t understand how the fires come to my house, because here there were no trees,” said Tsangaris at the site of his destroyed home. “It was only grass here, and I had about ten olive trees. And they’re gone.”
Tsangaris, too, fled to the beach near his home as the fires raged through Kiotari. He already knew his home had been destroyed the day the blaze began. “I saw a big fire on the other side [near the house]. I thought, ‘That was my house.’” Having two stories, Tsangaris’ house was larger than most in Kiotari. He said that distinction let him know that the fires had swallowed his home.
“I was in a really bad way. I was upset about the fires. I couldn’t understand why [the government] could not stop the fires,” he said.
Tsangaris believes that Rhodes’ government will not give him any financial assistance to rebuild his home, which he said will cost around 250,000 euros in repairs. Instead, he is relying on funds that his son and ex-wife in Switzerland have already agreed to give him to try to rebuild his home and his life. But that kind of financial help from family is a luxury that others in Kiotari do not have.
At the once-prominent restaurant Angelaki Taverna, 27-year-old Dmitris Chatzifotis is lost. He doesn’t know what his options are after the fires destroyed his family restaurant. “I grew up in this restaurant. From [the time I was] a small kid, I take [control] of the money, I keep the business,” Chatzifotis said. “I keep people here. People come here to sit together with me, to speak. It’s not only a restaurant.”
Residents of Asklipio and Kiotari who spoke with The Real News said they received little assistance from Rhodes’ government with putting out the forest fires.
Almost everything inside the restaurant has been destroyed. A laptop and cash register on what was once the host desk are now completely melted, and looters eventually came at night to steal anything that was salvageable, including a refrigerator. When the fires initially ended, Chatzifotis believed that he might get 2,000 euros from the Rhodes government, nowhere near the 200,000 euros he needed for repairs and to buy new equipment. But now he believes he will not receive any money.
“I don’t have feelings, believe me. Sometimes, I say I won’t open again. Other times, I think I hope to get some money to open again. We don’t know, because we don’t have the support from the government,” said Chatzifotis.
“ Here [we had] fire for 12 days and nobody came. You don’t have feelings,” he added.
According to Greek authorities, around 10 percent of Rhodes was damaged by the summer wildfires. In Rhodes City, few traces that any wildfires occurred are present, and life seems like it has been unfazed. But down the road in Kiotari and Asklipio, one sees nothing but scorched earth. On the Kiotari beach a few cars that were completely destroyed by the fires sit next to melted sun chairs stacked together by restaurant workers during the cleanup effort. The tourist industry in Rhodes has continued to suffer since the fires ended. Even the visitors who return to the island cannot make up for all that was lost in just two weeks.
“I saw a big fire on the other side [near the house]. I thought, ‘That was my house.’”
John Tsangaris, a resident of Kiotari, greece, whose home was destroyed in the late-summer fires
The once-green trees covering the rolling mountains near the two villages have been badly burned. While some survived, they’re all gray now, with no leaves intact. In the forests surrounding Asklipio sit plots of charred land where Eleni once had a vast amount of olive trees—part of the dowry she received when she married her husband decades before.
“I can’t believe it. They’re all gone,” she whispered as she walked through the lots of land for the first time since the fires ended. She shed a few tears in the process as she tried to count how many olive trees had been burned—four here, ten there. She was told she could receive payments for the ones that had been killed.
The olive trees helped Eleni connect to her great-grandparents, who had planted the seeds decades before she was born. The ground here is rugged, filled with rocks and dry dirt, making it extremely difficult to dig deep enough to plant the trees.
“Back in those days, they didn’t have the equipment we have nowadays,” Eleni said. They used to come from the village on foot and put all the equipment on their donkeys. If they were lucky [enough] to have donkeys.”
Eleni was raised to love her olive trees, to take care of them, pruning their branches to help them grow larger. “My grandfather didn’t like pruning the trees because he felt like we were cutting something off him,” she said.
Some of Eleni’s olive trees were spared from the fires, and in the places where they did not survive, she plans to plant more trees to keep her family history tied to the land. “It’s something that we have to do. And I want to plant new trees because I want to pass them on to my descendants.”
“My boss used to say to everyone, ‘Welcome to our paradise.’ Now I said, ‘Welcome to my burnt paradise.’ But it’s going to become a paradise again,” she added.
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