On Cassandra, the fire proved to be the more stubborn. With the fire breaking out again and again in unlikely ways and in new areas, the suspicion of arson arose. As such, the Cassandra fire was prophetic.
On the second of August, the traditional month for the meltemi, a wind from the northeast began blowing across the country at near-gale force, causing cancellations of small sea and aircraft departures. Twelve new and major conflagrations broke out in various parts of the country that day, and on the following, several factories on the National Road near Athens were destroyed, as well as a camping site in Kifissia which resulted in the death of a German tourist.
Around midday on August 4, a fire broke out next to a patisserie in Ekali. Fanned by the wind, it quickly spread jouth through a residential area; broke out again in Kastri; then swept through Politeia; started up in Kefallari; destroyed almost all of the Syngros forest; and reached the upper areas of Maroussi and Melissia. By late afternoon most of the western slopes of Mount Pendeli were in flames, casting a pall of black smoke over Athens. A national emergency was declared and units of the armed forces were rushed in, contributing efficiently and effectively to the prevention of further destruction.
The government held to the belief that the fires were due to ‘natural’ causes, the erratic behavior of fires in a strong wind, the explosive nature of pine cones and the dryness of the scrubland. Many eye-witnesses thought otherwise. At the patisserie in Ekali where the first of the August 4 fires broke out, people claimed to have seen a young man on a motorcycle throwing an ignited gasoline-soaked cloth into some dry grass. Fires which soon broke out after the Ekali one near Stamata and Agios Stefanos lay well to the north of southward blowing wind. Others believed that the fires were deliberately set with tactical exactitude in many spots in a straight line following the down draft of the wind.
The suspicion of arson with more sinister intent was brought dramatically to the public’s attention last December when conflagrations, breaking out within minutes of each other, gutted two leading department stores in downtown Athens. Political extremists were sought, suspects interrogated, but none were accused. In early June, two more department stores were similarly attacked, and yet two more again later in the month. A few more arrests were made — of people associated with left-wing organizations — but again they were released for lack of evidence. In the case of the fires of August 4 (a date of political significance coinciding with the beginning of the dictatorship of General Metaxas), a terrorist group claimed responsibility, saying it would destroy the country by fire unless a general amnesty was declared for the imprisoned leaders of the Junta which fell in 1974. It may have been a hoax, and it may not.
Given the extent of the damage suffered in the northern suburbs, it is surprising that only thirty-nine houses and buildings were destroyed and that only one life was lost. The fire brigades fought tirelessly against heavy odds with insufficient equipment. (The combined fire departments throughout the country employ 4,000 men; there is no organized volunteer system; and the six fire-fighting airplanes cannot use their chemical equipment in inhabited areas.)
Among the most heroic were the residents themselves who were determined to save their and then-neighbors’ property. Hence, hundreds of homes were saved while the trees all around them were destroyed and the loss of many which burned was due to their owners’ being away on holiday. Having worked so successfully together against these fires, citizens decided to continue to do so to prevent the outbreak or spread of new ones. It was fitting, therefore, that the first alleged arsonist to be apprehended in the act was taken by citizens’ arrest in Vari on August 8.
Heretofore, deliberate burning off of open areas has been, in most cases, labelled a misdemeanor rather than a crime. The burning of forest land may carry a one-to-five year sentence; two-to-five years if personal property is destroyed; five-to-ten years, if it involves endangering life; and ten years to life-imprisonment if somebody dies. In the case of the culprit apprehended at Vari, the man openly told his captors that he had happily cracked a number of students’ skulls during the notorious Polytechnic massacre under the Junta in 1973, and that he was now hired as a hit-man. Later, to the police, he claimed that he was psychologically disturbed: that he was an alcoholic, a homosexual, a drug addict. His case was taken to the Court of the first instance where it was reviewed. On the suggestion of a civil witness, the public prosecutor recommended to the judges that the case needed further investigation and that it be referred to the criminal court. The judges agreed to tiiis, Other alleged arsonists were subsequently arrested by citizens in the next ten days, but the results of their legal processes were still unknown by August 20.
The Vigilantes of the Northern Suburbs
After the fires of August 4 had been extinguished, it was natural that groups of neighbors should continue banding together to prevent or contain future fires. This led to the organizing of vigilante groups in the northern suburbs. Given the political overtones attached to these acts of arson, the party affiliations of one’s neighbors suddenly took on an added and lively interest. In Ekali and Kastri, Politeia and Kifissia, you may not know all your neighbors well, but you certainly are fully informed on every nook and cranny in their political pasts. Hence, some neighbors are known to see the public peril as a Red Brigade form of arson-from-the-left, some as a neo-Fascist, Masonic, Juntist arson-from-the-right and a few who insist on the auto-combustibility of pine cones. Yet it is an infallible law of political science that people, whatever their political views, do not like to have their houses burned down by anything or anybody. This has led to a camaraderie across party lines and shows democracy at the grassroots (in the northern suburbs, roots are about the only things left) at its most heart-warming.
As it has been said, there are leaders and there are followers. Leaders of these minutemen are public-spirited persons with a talent for organizing. Leaders may be of any political party, but there is a difference of style. A vigilante leader of the left, dipping into his ELAS experience in the mountains during the war, prefers guerrilla tactics. He wants his neighbors to sit all night in the dry grass of vacant lots, silent as Indians, or to stand on dark street corners holding pine branches (used for beating out flames) pretending to be sapling trees and reporting on every suspicious character they see. The leader of the right prefers grander maneuvers. He spreads out an ordnance map of Mount Pendeli next to a much foxed and folded map of the battle of El Alamein (in which he fought beside the British) and talks in military terms. He knows all about wind velocities and wants all his neighbors to buy walkie-talkies to communicate back to ‘headquarters’.
These vigilante groups began very enthusiastically. On August 9, for example, a man in a beige Volkswagen who stopped for seven minutes under a pine tree on a back street of Kifissia to eat a cheese sandwich was reported back to ‘headquarters’ by six different individuals. His only misdemeanor was that he threw the sandwich wrapper out of the window when he drove off.
But as the week advanced, and the two-hour night vigils seemed to grow longer, the followers began to grow lax. By Saturday, August 15, most former vigilantes were watching Love Boat while the leaders, recording the numbers of passing ‘Kamikazes’, kept their vigil alone.
The Last Battle of Salamis
Lying just off Piraeus on Athens’ near horizon, Salamis on most days is shrouded in the effusions of Eleusis’ factories and shipyards. But in 480 BC, the people of Athens, who had taken refuge on Salamis, were able to see all too clearly their city sacked and burned by the Persian Army. After the defeat of the Persian Navy off Salamis in what was one of the few truly decisive battles in history Themistocles set up a victory monument whose traces were rediscovered by two American archaeologists in this century on the tip of the Cynosoura Peninsula. Thereafter, this area became sacred ground, as hallowed to all Greeks of classical antiquity as Marathon. Yet a plan recently talked of in government circles in Athens would irrevocably destroy it.
As part of the present government’s long range plans to keep down energy costs in the face of rising liquid fuel prices, certain industries, principally DEI, will switch to coal in the next few years. A company headed by Kostas Diamantis has proposed the construction of a coal terminal on the Cynosoura peninsula, partly on land currently occupied by Diamantis’ shipyards. This site has been selected because it is conveniently close to Greece’s major industrial area and provides a deep-water port capable of handling ships of up to 200,000 tons. In order to provide space for stockpiling the coal and for docking the carriers, a large section of the 40-acre area will have to be levelled and the irregular coastline straightened. In a related operation it has been proposed to obliterate completely the tip of the peninsula, including the scrappy traces of Themistocles’ monument, partly in order to facilitate the passage and docking of the coal carriers.
This plan has caused grave concern among residents of the area for purely environmental reasons, and among archaeologists and lovers of antiquity here and abroad for the threat it presents to what ought to be a national landmark and monument. Environmentalists can hardly be comforted by the attitudes prevailing in certain circles, and summarized in a Diamantis-inspired article by journalist Niko Nikolaos in Kathimerini, which states that the whole of the area is in such a deplorable state that concern over its further despoliation is “a little ridiculous”.
Eventually, perhaps, the environmental mess in this area can be cleaned up, but the proposed earth-moving and landfill operations will destroy forever, and for all generations to come, a small strip of land which is culturally so precious. It has been stated, rather naively, that the area is “of little archaeological value”. To ascertain this an excavating team was dispatched earlier this summer to investigate some classical tombs there. But to speak in terms of “archaeological value” clouds the issue and plays into the hands of those who want to exploit the area. The question is not strictly one of archaeological value but of historical worth in its broadest terms.
Greece’s history is its chief national treasure, but because the force of its argument lacks the tangibility of a priceless museum object, it may not impress the forces of industrialization and economic progress. Yet it is inconceivable that the present government should allow the desecration of the Cynosoura Peninsula, so closely identified with the whole spirit and creative power of an extraordinary moment in Western history, just because it happens to be a piece of land. The profile of Cynosoura, its coves, its beaches where the bodies of those who died in battle were washed up, the poor remains of its trophies.and tombs: these must be preserved with the diligent care that is devoted to the finest treasures in all the museums of Greece.
