Hello from the Athens airport! I’m heading to Porto tonight but arrived painfully early to catch up on work. The past few days have been a bit quieter than my first week in Greece, yet full of research opportunities that more than made up for my slower start.
On Saturday, I made the trip out to Mati, a beachside suburb of Athens. Although it’s only a 45-minute drive from the city center, I had to spend 45 minutes on the train, an hour on the bus, and walk along the side of a highway for 30 minutes to reach town. If you’ve ever been to Athens, you know that the city is filled with near-identical white apartment buildings. All multi-story and crammed together, with uniform balconies that almost make them look like huge dressers. Here, only a few multistory buildings punctuated rows of houses with lavish gates and big yards, even some with green lawns (I literally cannot imagine how much water that must take). It is notably wealthier than the city, and residents seem older on average. The exceptions were the families and other young(er) people staying at the several hotels along the beachfront.
The Mati beachfront
While Mati is certainly charming, I wasn’t really there as a tourist. In 2018, almost six years ago to the day, this town suffered the second deadliest fire event in the 21st century. Two coincident, fast-moving fires engulfed Mati and nearby houses. For a variety of reasons (reasons that are central to my being here in the first place), residents didn’t know what to do; most tried to drive away or run into the sea. 103 people died, many having drowned or burned during their attempt to escape.
When designing this research project, I selected countries with a major fire in the past seven-ish years. The idea was to see how communities reacted to that one event, and transitively, how it had impacted disaster management on a regional or national level. However, my conversations in Australia showed me that the event I had focused on, the 2019-2020 Black Summer fires, wasn’t as individually impactful as I had assumed. My interviews in Greece told me the opposite. When I asked about wildfires, almost every interviewee brought up Mati on their own and cited it as a major political event. One even told me it was one of the two deciding factors in the 2019 elections, which resulted in a party switch (although to be fair, other people I talked to would probably disagree). News stories called it “biblical” and “a living hell.” The trials to hold officials accountable for these deaths are ongoing.
In Australia, it was much harder to get to the areas burned in the Black Summer fires, especially without a car — plus, my interviews told me that other observation sites might be more fruitful. But every conversation I’ve had here, whether formal or informal, suggested that Mati was a core piece in the puzzle of how Greeks understand (and protect themselves against) fire disaster. This field trip would help me contextualize their stories about the event itself and see what recovery looks like several years down the road.
A path leading up to the ocean. Gorgeous!
Luckily, my visit did help visualize some of the common threads that came up in interviews. For example, several people told me that part of the reason the fire had been so deadly was that many of the buildings in Mati (like those in Athens and other parts of Greece) had been designed and built without permits, which made evacuation much more challenging. The image most kept pointing to was how close the buildings were to the water: “If you see a house where you can go out the front door and step into the sea after five steps, that’s illegal.” And it’s true; even the big hotel buildings seemed very close to the ocean. Interviewees also described Mati as a “resort” town where many Athenians go to get away for the weekend or longer holidays — this proximity, too, added to the disaster’s shock value. I’m glad I got to see the hotels for myself because they’re smaller than what I’d think of as a resort. But I did see their point. Wildfires are “supposed” to happen in small, remote areas near the forested mountains or islands of Greece. A disaster in this wealthier beachside vacation town — especially one that carried such viscerally tragic stories — was bound to be more personally and politically evocative.
Two neighboring houses in Mati. Clearly a lot more done to renovate one compared to the other.
I also wanted to see how much progress the recovery projects had made in the past six years. I’ve seen dozens of photos of Mati in the days following the fire: the empty, blackened cars and structures make the town look haunted. But I had no idea what to expect after this many years. Walking through the residential neighborhoods, most houses showed little signs that there had ever been a fire. But every five or six buildings there would be an empty plot with scorch marks, if not a hollowed structure waiting to be revived. Many yards had blackened stumps hiding beside the otherwise green, curated landscaping. It begged the question: why was one family’s house rebuilt while their neighbors’ weren’t? And whose responsibility was it? I’m hoping further reading and interviews might give me some answers.
I also noticed sticks, leaves, and other yard rubbish piled high next to residential garbage dumpsters. My guess is that they are evidence of a policy one expert had mentioned in an interview, where residents are required to clean a perimeter around their houses to create a kind of fuel break for a potential wildfire. Although the policy isn’t new, it’s been much more strictly enforced in recent years, and you can get fined or otherwise penalized for failing to comply. The streets are far too dense to do this kind of thing in Athens, but seeing such adherence to the policy in Mati tells me that the consequences of ignoring it feel more tangible. It’s also a visual reminder of an apparent motif of local fire management here: residents are responsible for the safety of their houses, loved ones, and communities. At least, they’re made to believe they are. The actual effectiveness of these perimeters is debatable, as they are often small enough for a major fire to jump over anyway. But placing this physical, mental, and ultimately financial onus on residents undoubtedly sends a message about their role with respect to the fire disasters that threaten their livelihoods.
A (blurry, very sorry) photo of the organic waste piled along the road.
The next day involved less adventuring, as my trek to Mati had tuckered me out. But I did go on a tour focused on the social and political history of Greece. So many of my interviews involved discussions of Greek politics, and I am pretty lousy at feigning any knowledge on the subject — I thought it would be a great opportunity to gain more context for my research and to hear what non-expert locals had to say about fires. And it was! (It was also a lot of fun.)
I went on a little too long about Mati (sorry) so I’ll just give you a couple of my favorite tidbits:
- Politics in Greece seem to align on a more West vs Anti-West spectrum than in the US. For example, the more establishment party recently legalized same-sex marriage, but the communists were against it. Whaaaat? The tour guide said it’s because LGBTQ rights are seen as a Western phenomenon and the communists are pointedly anti-West. I’m blaming homonationalism.
- There is no separation between church and state, to the point that the ministry of education and religion are the same thing. Apparently, to be anti-Greek Orthodox Church is to be anti-Greek. But, our guide said, the priests can be bribed with salary increases or threats to their tax-exempt status. The church is the single biggest landowner in the country — they own, and therefore have exemptions on, everything from resorts on the Athens Riviera to gay clubs (I know right).
- There’s a neighborhood, Exarcheia, that’s internationally known as a historical center of anarchism and political activism. Its reputation was born in the 1970s when students at a nearby university occupied a building to protest their authoritarian government and were killed by the military-grade tanks called to disperse them. Today, the activism in the neighborhood is in part focused on preventing the gentrification driven by AirBNB and plans to build a new metro station. Police were completely banned in Exarcheia from 2015 to 2019 (a product of the debt crisis and resulting protests), which is what allowed the political community to flourish. Now, it’s almost impossible to walk through the streets without seeing a squadron of police equipped with full riot gear — presumably protecting the construction of the subway.
While I thoroughly enjoyed my time in Greece, I am happy to be moving on to my next location. I’m starting a new phase of my trip today — these next few weeks will be filled with more travel, less touristy places, and will overall lack the consistency I was getting used to in Sydney and Athens. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t a bit anxious. But for now, my excitement is far stronger than my nerves. See you in Porto!