The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Travel
Fire-ravaged Evia will still enchant you
Beyond the areas affected by the flames, this Greek island is as beautiful as ever – and travellers can aid its recovery, says Heidi Fuller-love
After the two-hour drive from Chalkida, the island of Evia’s capital, I stopped to stretch my legs near Mantoudi, high in the mountains of the north. Far below, the Aegean Sea glittered, as green as a Mythos beer bottle caught in sunlight. But the surrounding scenery resembled the aftermath of a mammoth barbecue: there were burnt-out cars, incinerated churches and smokeblackened houses. The sad remnants of the biggest blaze Greece has known.
Riffled by a warm autumn breeze, the paper ash – all that remained of the Aleppo pines around which birds once sang, bees buzzed and cicadas fizzed – clung to my car windscreen, creating a snowy picture frame for the nightmare scene. The forest that once covered this mountainside had been destroyed and a graveyard scent like days-old smoke on damp sheets hung in the air.
More than a third of northern Evia’s pine forests and olive groves went up in smoke in the August conflagration – and with them the livelihoods of the resin collectors who brought €5.5million (£4.7million) to the island each year; the beekeepers who made Evia’s famous pine honey; and the oil producers who lived from the money they made from their olives. At Rovies, on Evia’s north-western flank, I stopped off for a café frappé. The waitress pointed out the blackened hulk of what used to be a popular hotel. “We just never thought something like this could happen to us,” she said.
The fire, which gutted 50,795 hectares of forested land – from Ellenika in the island’s far north east to the outskirts of Istaia and on down to Rovies – finally burnt out near the seaside resort of Ilia. Heading for the coastal town of Edipsos I was surrounded by dense, living pine forests – after the charred landscapes I’d travelled through, it was like entering a secret garden. “We want people to know that not all of northern Evia has been destroyed,” the town’s assistant mayor,
Lemonia Moro, told me when I met her later in a seafront café to sample the fig pastries for which this region is famed.
As I nibbled the moist, nutty cakes, Moro told me about a new governmentbacked #SupportEvia tourism campaign, which aims to promote the island in the wake of the fires. “We Greeks love Evia but tourists have barely heard of the island. We want to use this disaster as a chance to change that, at least – we want people to come and see for themselves, but also to spend time here and see how beautiful it is,” she said.
At the height of the fires, which began in early August, Kyriakos Mitsotakis, the prime minister of Greece, gave orders to evacuate this entire region. “We refused to go – we were being told to abandon our homes but we were determined to save them,” Moro told me with quiet pride.
For 10 days, she and her neighbours battled using hosepipes, buckets of water, brooms – whatever was to hand – to put out the massive blaze. “We were like Leonidas’ troops fighting the Persians – it was like fighting a war,” she told me with a catch in her voice.
As well as fighting a raging fire in the 45C heat, Moro and her neighbours battled with Greek bureaucracy. “Although 102 people died in the Mati inferno in 2018, our fire departments are still understaffed and have problems working together,” she said. “But there were also fires all over Greece at the time – we are a small country and we just didn’t have the resources to deal with that many fires.”
Just an hour’s drive and a short ferry hop from Athens, Edipsos is renowned for its mineral-rich therapeutic waters – said to cure everything from gout to heart sickness. Thermae Sylla Spa &
Wellness Hotel overlooks the bay where legend says Agamemnon and his fleet sought shelter on their way to fight the Trojan War. I sought solace in the spa, electing to be wrapped in the gluey volcanic mud that is said to be excellent for toning the skin. Later, the hotel’s owner, Voula Anastasopoulou, told me she had had dozens of cancellations because of the fires. “And yet nothing burnt here,” she said.
Inviting me to see some of the other sights that survived northern Evia’s flames, Lemonia Moro drove me out along a beach-lined coast dotted with low-key seaside villages the following
‘We want people to know that not all of northern Evia has been destroyed’
day. We passed the pretty port of Agiokampos, where ferries leave for the mainland, through Pyrgos, with its long sandy shoreline and beach shack tsipouradikos serving meze and pomace brandy tsipouro, and on to Orei, renowned for its fish restaurants and its fourth-century BC bull sculpture.
As the sun sank low on the pine treestudded horizon, we climbed inland to the village of Taxiarchis, famed for its fig orchards. At Fotini’s café on the square we ordered the local version of coq au vin – chunks of rooster braised in a rich tomato sauce and served with egg and sheep milk hilopites pasta. “This is another reason why tourists should come here – to eat our wonderful food,” Moro said.
On my last day in northern Evia, I followed a potholed road around the bay to Gialtra, a hillside hamlet on the edge of the forested Lichada peninsula. Here, Giannis Vriniotis owns the region’s only accredited winery (vriniotiswinery.gr). Sitting on a terrace overlooking the bay we sipped one of his spicy, full-bodied reds made with the rare vradiano grape, which grows only in central Greece and northern Evia. Giannis told me that even here the smoke was so thick he could barely see across the bay.
“Tourism is the best hope for northern Evia now,” he said, emphasising the importance of the economic support visitors could provide in the wake of the disaster. “With climate scientists saying fires are the ‘new normal’ I just hope it won’t be our last chance,” he sighed, raising his glass of ruby wine to catch the dying rays of sunlight.