The Prelude

Greek fires kill 60 but spare ancient Olympia

http://www.reuters.com/article/worldNews/idUSL2543062320070826

By Vassilis Triandafyllou

ANCIENT OLYMPIA, Greece (Reuters) – Firefighters saved the temples and stadiums of ancient Olympia, birthplace of the Olympic Games, from forest fires which razed nearby villages and took the death toll from Greece’s three-day inferno to 60.

Dozens of blazes, from northern Greece to the tip of the Peloponnese peninsula in the south, have blackened hillsides, destroyed forests and raced through towns and villages, causing unprecedented destruction.

Hundreds of houses have been burned and thousands of people have fled the fires, seeking temporary refuge in schools, hotels and regional health centers.

On Sunday the government offered rewards of up to a million euros ($1.36 million) for help in tracking down arsonists who it suggests have played a major role in Greece’s worst forest fires in decades.

Thick black smoke billowed over the well-preserved ruins of Olympia, on the Peloponnese. The blaze crept up a hillside, engulfing surrounding pine and cypress woods.

“With self-sacrifice, firefighters fought ‘trench battles’ to rescue these sensitive and important sites,” Public Order Minister Byron Polydoras told reporters.

Fire scorched the yard of the museum at Olympia, housing famous classical sculptures such as Praxiteles’ Hermes, but planes, helicopters and scores of firefighters beat it back.

Some 60 firefighters and six trucks remained at the site to battle any flare-up, the fire brigade said.

Ancient Olympia, which hosted the Olympics for centuries from 776 BC, holds an Olympic flame ceremony every two years and is among the most popular tourist sites in the country.

“Here it is, the contrast: ancient Greece gave the world civilization and modern Greece gives it destruction,” a resident of ancient Olympia told Alter TV station.

Towering walls of flame have cut a swathe of destruction through the southern Peloponnese and the island of Evia near the capital and swept across other regions, prompting Greece to declare a nationwide state of emergency on Saturday.

“The destruction is of biblical proportions,” Nicholas Orphanos, a volunteer firefighter in the Peloponnese, told reporters. “There are villages we want to go to and we cannot because the roads are blocked. In 30 years, I have never seen such destruction.”

The fires have covered Athens in thick white ash that swirled round the temples on the Acropolis, and the smell of smoke permeated the city.

REWARD OFFERED

Prime Minister Costas Karamanlis, who has called a snap parliamentary election on September 16, has suggested arsonists are behind the fires, and the government has offered a reward for information leading to their capture.

“The reward is set between 100,000 and 1 million euros for every (act of) arson, depending on whether death or serious injury occurred and the size of the damage,” the Public Order Ministry said in a statement.

Many local mayors have accused rogue land developers of setting fires to make way for new construction on virgin forest and farm land. So far, police have arrested two elderly people and two boys on suspicion of starting fires deliberately.

The first fires broke out on Friday and others erupted in scores of places around the country. The death toll rose to 60 and health officials said it could increase as many villages remain cut off.

“We will all burn tonight,” a resident of Matesi village told Mega television on Sunday. “Where will we go, we are trapped everywhere. Are we all going to burn like mice?”

The overstretched fire brigade threw reinforcements from Greece’s EU partners into action to fight blazes stretching over 160 km (100 miles) across the Peloponnese, the island of Evia and northern and central Greece.

Two French and one Italian firefighting plane dropped water on burning hillsides and 60 firefighters from Cyprus joined the fray. More help was expected from at least 11 countries.

Villagers used garden hoses and buckets in futile efforts to save their homes. Others jeered politicians, including Culture Minister George Voulgarakis who visited ancient Olympia to assess the damage.

The government has been criticized for reacting too slowly to forest fires that killed 10 people earlier this summer and the blazes are sure to become a central election campaign issue.

Athens, Greece (2009). Wall outside the Greek parliament. Riot police officer standing next to the wall. The slogan on the wall was written by anarchists protesters that joined hundreds of migrants to demonstrate against police violence and demand more liberal immigration laws.

British popgroup Pet Shop Boys used QR-code for the artwork of their download-only single Integral in 2007. The videoclip for the song also features QR-code. When the codes are scanned correctly, users are directed to petshopboys.co.uk, and web pages about the British national identity card plans, respectively. ***

Users with a camera phone equipped with the correct reader software can scan the image of the QR Code causing the phone’s browser to launch and redirect to the programmed URL. This act of linking from physical world objects is known as a hardlink or physical world hyperlinks. Users can also generate and print their own QR Code for others to scan and use by visiting one of several free QR Code generating sites.  (Wiki)

Catalysts

Narrativizing disasters = fictionalizing history = historicizing fiction.

Any account of the disaster attempts to impose coherence and mastery over random or unpredictable “events”.  Myths provide us with ready-made adaptable narratives that resonate within culture at large, and can therefore be applied to any disaster. Myths attempt to bring the disaster – an intangible presence/ absence that escapes cultural logic - inside the culture so as to render it comprehensible and, ultimately, [retrospectively] predictable. As Steven Biel asserts, myths are welcomed by culture because they locate “a disturbing event within routine structures of understanding.”

Although not immediately obvious, the typical structure of myths is based on – and forged through – catalysts. Any myth can be traced back to a  catalyst(s) that not only stimulates the (re)creation/ (re)cycling of the myth itself, but also provides myth-makers with a tangible starting point on which they can elaborate their myth.

An iceberg. A bomb. A plane. A boy.

With this in mind, I turn myself to the identifiable catalyst (or even scapegoat) that is thought to have triggered the Greek Riots: Alexandros Grigoropoulos.

15 year old Alexandros is dead. The only thing certain about his dead is that he is dead.

Alexandros was shot by a policeman.

Alexandros was accidentally killed.

Alexandros provoked his death.

Alexandros is a political scapegoat.

Alexandros’ murderer is a social scapegoat.

Alexandros ……………………………….

This is where most related narratives begin.

“We construct a narrative for ourselves, and that’s the thread we follow from one day to the next. People who disintegrate as personalities are the ones who lose that thread.”  Paul Auster

“Shall I project a world?”

(Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49)

Easing myself into the blogging of the disaster. Here we go…

“It is not you who will speak; let the disaster speak in you, even if it be by your forgetfulness or silence.” (Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster )

“The spectacle inherits all the weaknesses of the Western philosophical project which undertook to comprehend activity in terms of the categories of seeing… The concrete life of everyone has been degraded into a speculative universe”.  – Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle.

Yes, but dwelling on the representational and the simulated still does not resolve the identity issue. It does not negate – and does not ultimately discard – the aporia.