In the villages at the foot of Parnes, a mountain massif north of Athens, it still smells of burning.
At the end of August, a fierce fire devoured more than 6,100 hectares of forests, but also reached some houses, killed animals, destroyed at least two restaurants. The same streets, where a few days ago the neighbors became volunteer firefighters to try to save their belongings, on Wednesday were a stream caused by the historic storm Daniel.
While central Athens turned into chaos, with restaurant tables in the touristy Monastiraki square washed away by water, on Mount Parnes the nearby river overflowed due to the heavy rains that have ravaged Greece this week. It had never rained so much in such a short time. All records have been broken. The storm has hit the center of the country, with the plain of Thessaly - the only large plain in Greece - turned into an immense lake of about 70,000 flooded hectares.
At least ten people have died, millions of dollars in damage have been caused to agriculture, entire villages have been wiped out. No one remembers a similar phenomenon in the past. The water, although it did not cause such destruction in Athens, also reached the capital, where it forced the closure of metro stops, and in Parnes, when it was still recovering from the flames. In the port of Piraeus, from where ferries depart for the main islands of the Aegean, 40 centimeters of flooding were exceeded. In other main avenues of the capital, pedestrians were run over by the floods.
"A few days ago there was a fire. Now we are removing water and mud from the kitchen", explained 72-year-old Theodoros, who was doing what he could with an excavator that a friend had left for him to remove mud from the entrance to his house. "The drain was blocked and the water reached up to 50 centimeters", he said, while pointing with his hand to the level to which it covered him.
In Menidi, the main street is a promenade of traditional taverns in a previously idyllic location, considered the lung of Athens. Parnes, a protected natural park, is the mountain where Athenians flock in droves on weekends to breathe fresh air and escape the hustle and bustle of the city. More than a thousand species of plants and animals live there. Now the few who remain on the street sweep mud. On their phones, they show videos of the ravages of the storm: the street was no longer a street, it was a river that swept away everything it found as it passed. Not far away, some burned vehicles are still there, as if they want to be a reminder of the flames that swept the mountain.
"It is a punishment from the gods. It's as if they wanted to punish us for something...or worse, that the world would end", laments Giota, a Tourism student who works at the Parnes shelter.
The road to get there is complicated. In the bends, the trees and the soil removed after the fires have been added. The landscape is bleak. The pines are still black, and it will take at least ten years to recover them. "It's the worst thing that could have happened. You can rebuild the houses, but not the mountain", exclaims Giota inside the shelter. It's still raining outside.
She also lives at the foot of the mountain. The fire was so close to his house that he had to pack his bags and escape with his mother. The men stayed there, to protect the property and try to lend a hand to the firefighters. "It is very dangerous to walk around here now, because the fire is so recent that the earth is fragile, and with the floods..., I was afraid that there would be people who would drown", he admits. His boss, Yannis, had to run out. As an expert mountaineer, he was called to lend a helping hand to those trapped by the floods in central Greece. The roads were closed and the traffic ban was still in force, but not for emergency teams. More than 2,800 people have had to be evacuated so far.
"I think I've seen it all. First, the pandemic. Then the fires. And now this. I had never imagined anything like this. Yesterday we had some floods that came from the mountains and that looked like something out of a movie. What else can happen to us?” asks Iorgos, sitting in the patio of his house, which is also the last restaurant still standing before reaching the mountain.
A few meters further, the paths are calcined. The flames, he explains, were unbeatable, "more than 30 meters" high. When he saw them, he couldn't think of anything other than to take the fire extinguisher and try to put them out. The firemen forced them into the trucks and abandon everything. The restaurant in front, which was used for ceremonies, is completely burnt.
Greeks are furious about the natural disasters that have hit the country in a fateful summer that has seen it all: heat waves, droughts, fires and now floods. The one in Parnes is one of the hundreds of forest fires that have been declared this summer, particularly warm in the Mediterranean, and which have left 26 dead. The one in Ebros, in the border forests with Turkey, is already the biggest fire recorded in Europe, with more than 90,000 hectares destroyed.
The government of Kiriakos Mitsotakis, the centre-right prime minister who was re-elected with broad support in June's elections, blames climate change for all the extreme phenomena, and has promised to spare no effort to compensate those affected. With the floods alone, for the professor of Natural Disaster Management at the University of Athens, Efthimios Lekkas, the damage could exceed one billion euros.
But many citizens are enraged and believe that the Executive should have done more. "The problems are many. And what does the Government do? Blah blah blah They talk but do nothing", criticizes Theodoros, surrounded by mud, at the door of his house. “I'm not an expert on fires, but here there was only a plane throwing water. Can you explain to me how they had to contain the fire with a single plane?” protests Iorgos, who assumes that it will take months, if not years, for the restaurant to once again attract the Greek and foreign tourists who used to go to Parnes.
Another neighbor, Maria, is harsher and says that only the citizens worked actively to contain the flames, while the firefighters stood by and did nothing. "We are angry and disappointed. I don't know whose fault it is, but we can't go on like this. What will be next? My sister is trapped in Volos”, he says, about the first city completely flooded this week, capital of the region of Magnesia.
"It is a strong Government because it has won two elections in a row - the elections were repeated because in the first they did not obtain an absolute majority - but the pressure is growing from civil society and even from the media, which generally give center right support. With the fires, and now with the floods, we see many voices being raised that we are not used to, who say that it is all chaos and that there have never been so many disasters in such a short time", explains the journalist from research Kostas Zafeiropoulos.
"It's more than our houses - says Iorgos -. They are our forests, our memories. As a child I used to walk every day among the trees, and now it is all destroyed. They say it will get worse every year. what will we do We need help."
