The Greek Fires

I'm back in Athens and finally have a Net connection after 8 days. This is the first time in two years, or more, that I've been offline for any serious period of time. Amazing how accustomed we get to our toys. Anyway, we finally were able to head to southern Greece to see my parents' relatives, and that required driving through fire country. The fires had died down, for the most part, in the area we were heading to. We didn't expect, however, to find ourselves in the middle of miles and miles of totally dead mountains. It looked like the moon, and smelled, everywhere, like the world's largest camp fire. I took a load of pictures, and did a quick video blog at one point that I'm posting below. The fires ended up stopping, quite literally, only a few miles from my mom's and dad's villages in the south near Kalamata.



I can only imagine what a terrifying (and oddly beautiful) site it must have been to seen an entire mountain aflame in the night.



This is a nice little "life goes on" shot I took today driving through the mountains on the way back to Athens from Kalamata. The guy has set up a fruit stand along the road - everything is dead surrounding him for miles. (Though there are sporadic trees and bushes, amid the ashes, that are still green and alive. Weird.)



Here's a second video shot from the road. Notice how even though the car keeps going, and we cover more and more land, the entire landscape is dead.



PS Funny little story. We were staying the night in a town called Kalambaka, checking out the monasteries (from hell) at Meteora (more on those monasteries and the truly truly truly hateful people who work there, later). The owner of our hotel was telling us how a few days before someone had started some kind of fire in town, perhaps burning their garbage, no one was sure, but the fire kept growing and growing on the mountainside in the distance, and about 20 different guests at the hotel called the front desk in a panic. After all, 1/3 of the country was on fire. So, the owner calls the local fire department and tells them - amidst a national fire disaster - that there's some kind of fire going on on the mountainside. The fireman's response? "Is it big?"