‘The new reality’: Athens wildfire victims vow to adapt and stay put

Dimitris Petrou and his dog Mallou on the veranda of his burned-out home in Nea Penteli, Athens. Photograph: Helena Smith/The Guardian

“I used to talk to them every day.” Dimitris Petrou takes in the creatures that were once his fluffy chicks but now look like coals. The buckled cage with its carbonised birds is part of the cataclysmic scenery left behind by the fire that bore down on Athens after raging across the Attica plains consuming everything in its path.

The 72-year-old retiree and his wife, Frosso, though red-eyed and fatigued, are “somehow still going” but are profoundly shocked.

Three days have elapsed since the flames engulfed everything they once owned in Nea Penteli, a suburb of the Greek capital.

In the ash and wreckage lie the buildings they once knew as their home, the ruin they once called their car and the outhouses that once provided shelter for their animals.

“We stayed until we thought we would melt, we did everything we could to save it,” said Dimitris, cradling his dog Mallou. “The winds were so fierce that when the flames arrived everything you see, all this destruction, happened like this,” he said, clicking his fingers. “And then the wind must have changed because part of the garden survived, our cherry and fig trees over there survived, and nothing else in the neighbourhood was touched.”

The Petrou family are among the untold number of Greeks left homeless by the inferno that began on Sunday in the forested vicinity of Varnava “on the other side of the mountain” more than 20 miles (30km) away. Once ignited it moved with lightning speed, devouring woodland, destroying buildings and forcing thousands to evacuate homes across a vast swath of the Attic landscape north east of Athens.

Greece’s National Observatory research institute believes the blaze laid waste to at least 10,000 hectares of land.

But it was the sight of the conflagration reaching the capital’s residential areas, where citizens armed with little more than hosepipes, spades and towels were forced to douse flames themselves – and where a woman, later described as a Moldovan immigrant worker, succumbed to the fire when it gutted a wreath-making factory – that has caused alarm.

In a country inured to the phenomenon of summer wildfires the inferno has amounted to a realisation that on the frontline of the climate emergency and at a time when Europe is warming at a much faster rate than any other part of the world, survival may, as Lena and Antigone Kalpidou discovered this week, ultimately come down to luck.

“The plot next door went up in flames,” said Lena, 70, an archaeologist who moved with her sister to a Swiss-style apartment block looking on to Mount Penteli three decades ago. “It’s fate, really, that our building survived. Had our neighbour not been here and rushed to put out the fire with the garden hosepipe we might not have been so lucky.”

Yannis Panagiotou, the soft-spoken businessman who saved the day, still appears dazed as he recounts how he ran “up and down the street” extinguishing wind-propelled fireballs carried on pine cones and needles. “They were hurtling through the air at great speed,” he said. “I had my mask, towel, spade and hosepipe and with other residents who had also refused to be evacuated we rushed to snuff out the flames.”

It is not lost on Panagiotou that the drama of witnessing a wildfire barrel towards him on a street in an otherwise sedate northern suburb could be “the new reality”.

“And in new realities what do you do? You adapt,” he said. “Greece has to learn to do that but unfortunately the state in this country is utterly disorganised. It’s evident that it’s us citizens who will have to rise to the challenge posed by our changing environment.”

Three blocks away, Chryssa Vagdetli, 26, and her family have not been so lucky.

Standing amid the charred remains of what was once the sitting room of the three-storey stone villa she grew up in, the civil engineer still cannot believe how the inferno that began in the building’s roof could have raged so uncontrollably “for at least six hours”.

Where, she asks, were the firefighters?

She and her boyfriend rushed to the villa on Monday as soon as they were told smoke was emerging from the house.

But it was already too late. “The wooden roof above the loft went up first,” she said. “We were desperately calling the fire brigade, and every other service for help, but only a civil protection team turned up and very soon ran out of water. This is the result,” she sighed, pointing to the remnants of a white piano in the room. “Incredibly, my parents watched it in real time because a TV crew in the area arrived to film the fire. They were on holiday in Corfu and in total shock.”

Two other houses nearby were also heavily damaged.

“We’re talking about the state machinery of a developed country with every technology at its disposal, drones, planes, you name it, not being able to protect the capital. It’s insane.”

The Greek prime minister, Kyriakos Mitsotakis, insisted on Thursday that compensation would not only be forthcoming but swift. Amid widespread criticism of its handling of the fire, the centre-right government has been quick to announce relief measures, ranging from financial assistance to interest-free loans to rebuild properties.

“It means little,” said Vagdetli. “Experience has proved that such relief is always risible, a fraction of the value of what you lose. I’ve got friends who lost their home in a fire two years ago and are still waiting for the state to live up to its promise of help.”

“It’s all about prevention now,” says Penteli’s vice-mayor, Yiannis Zounis, as water-dropping aircraft fly overhead to thwart potential flare-ups. “We’ve now got five reservoirs in the municipality for firefighting aircraft to refuel [with water].”

Further south in Vrillisia, where the blaze also decimated buildings, Zounis’s counterpart Yannis Bitas says pruning and clearing the suburb’s forest of flammable shrubbery saved lives.

“No one had done anything to the forest for 30 years. If it had gone up in flames, the apartment blocks opposite could well have gone up too,” he said.

Like Vagdetli, Dimitris Petrou blames disorganisation “and bad coordination” on the part of Greece’s emergency services for his plight. “If one plane had made one drop [of water] it could have saved this house,” he said. “There were helicopters flying over the mountain and fire engines parked idly in the square when the flames were advancing.”

Responding to criticism from Greece’s main leftwing opposition party over the lacklustre number of water-dropping planes in the skies on Monday, the fire brigade said 36 aircraft had participated in the firefighting operation, more than on any other day.

Still, Petrou has no plans to move. Like the Kalpidou sisters, he wants to stay in Penteli precisely because the verdant landscape makes life in Athens more tolerable. “It’s so much cooler and the air so much fresher up here,” he said.

“We’ve lost so much: our possessions, our animals, the roof over our heads. But I’m determined. We’ll create an even bigger anti-fire zone around this property, we’ll build an even bigger water system in the event of emergency. We’ll start anew, all over again.”