The mother of four must have agonised as the wall of flames swept through the heavily forested mountain toward her holiday home in southern Greece — should she flee the approaching fire or not?
Athanasia Paraskevopoulou (37) had apparently tried to gauge where the inferno was headed last Friday: toward her home in Artemida or away from it.
“It was horrible,” neighbour Ioannis Tzevelekou (15) said of the situation. “The fire came over like a huge tide.”
Paraskevopoulou decided to gather her three daughters, aged 15, 12 and 10, and her five-year-old son and go to the village square just outside the town of Zaharo in the western Peloponnese. Her husband was elsewhere, and as the fire approached she bundled her children into a car.
If she had stayed at home, neighbours say the family would have survived. Her single-storey house was virtually unscathed by the fires.
“Nothing would have happened to them. The few that stayed didn’t get injured,” said Vassiliki Tzevelekou, another neighbour. “The house has not suffered any damage, but it’s better for the house to have been burnt than people.”
The schoolteacher from Athens was enjoying the end of the summer holiday season in the wooded mountain village near the sea when fires started breaking out in the region — fires that were later to engulf most of Greece and scorch world heritage sites such as Ancient Olympia, the birthplace of the Olympic Games.
But the approaching fire had struck fear among the 100 or so residents of the village, nestled amid the olive groves that were its main source of income.
“Everyone was in a panic. Within 10 minutes, the fire swept in from the east and was all around us, both above and below the village,” one of her friends, Lambrini Tzevelekou (37) and the mother of Ioannis, said. “They gathered everyone together in the square, Athanasia and her four children, along with two young foreign kids, two grandmothers and four other children, all left together packed in a car.”
The convoy sped out of the village and when the vehicles reached a fork in the road, a decision was made to go down toward Zaharo — about 10km away.
“There were two roads to choose from — there was no other alternative out of town. If you went down [the bottom road], you died. If you went on the upper road, you lived,” village president Giorgos Korifas said.
Tzevelekou said her friend “was a very good woman. What has happened was so unlucky.”
According to residents and rescuers, the leading part of the convoy apparently crashed into a fire truck speeding toward the village. The truck overturned, blocking part of the road. With little visibility because of the smoke, the remainder of the convoy then seems to have barrelled into the wreckage. Those who survived the pile-up, including Paraskevopoulou and her children, fled on foot.
Firefighters later found their charred remains huddled on a hillside near the accident, Paraskevopolou’s arms wrapped tightly around her children. Nine people died on that road and they were among 23 victims from the region around the village, the largest single group of dead in the 63 people claimed so far by the worst fires in living Greek memory.
Another couple, Panagiotis Lambropoulos (70) and his wife, were more fortunate.
“I saw the flames about 150m away. We got in the car, drove about 10m and then the flames suddenly grew huge,” he said. “We abandoned the car and crawled through the woods, about 400m, arm in arm so that if we died, we would die together.”
The couple managed to reach the upper road, and safety.
“It is incredible that villagers should abandon their homes by road in convoys without a fire truck to open the way for them, allowing an accident to cause the tragic losses we saw. I believe these deaths were due to criminal errors and ignorance of the danger and the circumstances of the blaze,” said Nikos Bokaris, head of the Panhellenic Union of Forestry Experts.
The decision faced by Paraskevopoulou, to stay or go, was similar to those made by thousands of people trapped unaided in often isolated mountain villages. Although Greece has the largest fleet of firefighting planes in Europe, its forces were stretched to breaking point on August 24, the day Paraskevopoulou died, as 124 fires raged around the country — many of them near Artemida. — Sapa-AP