The Chóra of Samothraki two years ago,
on Tuesday 20 October
2015.
It was two years ago that I was arriving
in Samothraki, no longer a tourist but in preparation for my PhD fieldwork application.
It was the same days as this year’s floods that I, ambitious and with a
questioning spirit, was stepping foot on the island, just two years ago.
Two years following those first days
everything is so different. Pictures depict a landscape all the sudden alienated,
a stranger. Questions bear no longer their fruitful character, but instead
awake nightmares. Words do not flow; and experience is a repetitious limbo
stuck in mind.
Walking amongst the debris and mud last
week, in the aftermath of the pouring rain and squall, I could not raise my
hands, hold the camera steadily and take pictures. Who would like to remember
this anyway? Who would possibly like to store and return to such pictures in
time?
Four years ago, while taking a semester
of my BA course in Social Anthropology at the University of Sussex as an
Erasmus student, I enrolled in a course called American Cities: New Orleans, at the Department of American
Studies. During the term, one of the topics that mostly preoccupied us was the
2005 Hurricane Katrina, which had disastrously and deadly hit New Orleans and, more
widely, the states of Louisiana and Mississippi. I bear a memory of this
incident myself, when, as a 12-year-old kid, I was watching photage of people trapped
on the roofs of their houses or swimming in the muddy water to escape overflown
areas in New Orleans. Last week, having just started conducting fieldwork in
Samothraki, having my house flooded overnight with rushing water and detritus
on Monday 25 September 2017, having been evacuated and found shelter in the
neighbours’ house and wearing borrowed clothes, I felt what these people, the
people I was watching on TV 12 years ago, must have been feeling at that time.
That was a natural disaster.
Just recently an online Greek media platform published an article reviewing the cities so far flooded in water and mud this year globally and raised, once more, the issue of climate change, calling 2017 “the year of mud”. It seems, 12 years on, not much has changed in
terms of our understanding: since Katrina, New Orleans keeps flooding on a regular basis.
Katrina was unprecedented. The deluge in
Samothraki was unprecedented as well; 330 mm of rain during half a day. An
unnecessary sense of irony makes me think that on both occasions, Katrina and Samothraki,
it was Monday. A more necessary burden sinks in my heart considering that
Katrina taught us no lessons after all. It is climate change: there had been no
rain in Samothraki throughout this summer, while normally there are several
squalls breaking each month (1). The land was dry and, on top of that, naked:
the wild goats overpopulating the island have already consumed the amount of
flora that is vital for the local ecosystem (2). And then, the water had no way
out when it rushed in the overbuilt village of Chóra (3). This problematic equation
already consists of three very-well-known facts (1+2+3), while the outcome is
no longer unknown = it is natural disaster; and it keeps repeating itself.
It is time we asked ourselves a question
worse to what happens after a natural disaster; apparently we have mastered
that one… We need to ask, how many natural disasters can we survive? You see, people develop
attachments with their land. The majority of the civilians affected by
Hurricane Katrina eventually returned to New Orleans to rebuild, some from
scratch, their homes, their stores and their lives, aware of the danger of
another flooding, and another after that, and then another… Minutes after the
rain stopped in the morning of Tuesday 26 September 2017, people walked outside
in Samothraki and started cleaning up their properties, collecting what could
be saved, helping the neighbours… Rebuilding is up next, but the danger of
another flood or even a landslide is immanent.
Rebuilding and restoration then need to
take place on the proper basis, readjusted to the current situation and the
possible climatic outbreaks. In 2005 Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath were just TV news for all of us in Greece. Yet, do you remember – back in those
days of prosperity – a Greek marathon raising money to be sent to those
affected by Katrina? Nowadays, what happened in Samothraki is just another
deluge. More are to follow. Nowadays, given the economic situation and the
frequency of natural disasters, charities are much rarer and cannot hold the response
key for such cases of emergency.
Taking pictures to make the disaster known,
raising money, motivating the restoration process immediately, helping each other;
it all matters. But, once recovered, we need to see beyond that. The next
deluge, near or far, must worry us all. Earth and water are ready to wipe us
out. And who could blame them for that?
Hurricane
Katrina hitting New Orleans, on Monday 29 August 2005.
Copyright
of Josh Neufeld. Source: http://www.smithmag.net/afterthedeluge/2007/01/01/prologue-1/12/
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