From her home in the Chicago suburbs, Helen Varvaressos always saw Greece as a touchstone.
The 70-year-old immigrant returned every year to the three-room country home where she and eight siblings once slept. As dusk fell, she’d admire the silvery leaves of the olive trees she harvested as a girl. The Greece of her childhood, a lush but crushingly poor country, had grown kinder with age. Wars were long forgotten. Tourism had brightened its fortunes.
Varvaressos was delighted that her American grandchildren could discover Greece, wander the lovely Peloponnese Peninsula and grasp the indescribable bond of family and land.
But a week of fire and death has darkened the family lore and threatened the future of Greece’s rural south. It has taken an emotional toll on Greeks on both sides of the Atlantic — at home in Greece and in immigrant communities in the United States.
Varvaressos was in Greece with her 75-year-old sister, Christina Tsekavis of Athens, when they barely outran a torrent of flame that rolled toward their family’s village of Grekos on Saturday and ravaged nearly everything in its path.
Only Tsekavis’ insistence that firefighters follow her back into the flames, along a dirt path she knew, saved the family home. Tsekavis charged in with firefighters to dampen the house and its perimeter with water.
Every tree and every animal in Grekos was lost, but a few dozen houses survived, including the family home — thanks to Tsekavis.
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“She hasn’t been able to sleep for days. I can’t either,” Varvaressos said Thursday, resting after four days of working without electricity to deal with the soot and water damage. “I never saw anything like it. Everywhere I turned, there was fire. You headed to that hill. Fire. You turned to that hill. Fire. I see the fire, there, in my face.”
Greek diaspora
The crisis has torn apart lives, but it also has brought people together from distant parts of the world. The Greek diaspora, 300,000 strong in the Chicago area and more than a million in and around New York, has followed the news on Greek-language television and begun Web site appeals for aid. Families here and abroad, tethered by cell phone connections even in the face of calamity, are in daily contact. Greeks in this capital city have rallied to send water, food and clothes down south.
Varvaressos is like so many Greeks of a certain generation who emigrated in search of a better life. She left her village when she was a girl to live with relatives in Australia. In the 1970s, as a mother and wife, she moved to the Chicago suburb of Palos Heights to be near her brother, Nick Andrews.
Just a few weeks ago, Andrews was with his sister in Greece, enjoying the cool breezes and sun of Grekos. Now he’s back in the Chicago area, and he and his sister share their sorrow by phone.
“I cried,” Andrews, a retired restaurant owner, said when he heard their tale of survival. “I love that house. It’s like a landmark. People from everywhere go there and take pictures. They don’t build houses like that anymore.”
Varvaressos said the house, built by her father, came through the fire with some burns and bumps and plenty of soot. But it stands, with a fig tree still flowering in its thick walls, for another generation.
“A lot of people left for America, for Australia, for all these places in order to make a life. But they all come back. If you’re from somewhere, you can’t forget it. … For so many of us, the Peloponnese was like a dream.”
Now a drive through the hills of the Peloponnese Peninsula is no longer a pleasure-seekers’ journey. Sixty-four people died in blazes that swallowed an estimated half-million acres nationwide. Once-forested hills are coated with ash so deep and dark that it looks like asphalt. The earth, pungent in the midday heat, stinks of loss.
Nikos Demas, a 29-year-old Greek native who is a doctoral candidate at the University of Illinois, was in Olympia on Wednesday. His family, with homes outside Chicago and in the Greek town of Amaliada, has followed the crisis closely.
The home in Amaliada was never in the line of fire, Demas said, but every few hours his mother had to sweep the balcony. Ash was piling high.
“It was crazy,” he said. “For four days all you saw was Greece burning. … It’s really sad to think about what’s happened. The only thing that is good is Greeks know how to take care of each other.”
The concern is global. Kuriakos Mellos of Arlington Heights runs the Daily Frappe Web site (dailyfrappe.com), which has information about the fires and how people can help.
Mellos said he has been overwhelmed by e-mails from people all over the world.
“We’re in mourning,” said Mellos, marketing director at the Hellenic Museum and Cultural Center in Chicago. “Everyone is so depressed. Think of Katrina, but in dozens and dozens of villages. Everything is wiped out … People are just very sad.”
All burned before them
Anastasia Alexandris, who lives in the village of Kallithea, has been in touch by phone with her brother in Glen Ellyn and her niece in Chicago to describe her family’s ordeal.
Alexandris told the Tribune she was with her husband and a son in their family home on a hillside when the flames roared through the valley before them. They saw their groves of olive trees turn black before their eyes. Within a half-hour, the fire lapped up at their balcony railings. Only then the wind changed, Alexandris said. The fire fell back on itself and onto a landscape too devastated to burn any longer.
Every day has been hard since, Alexandris said. Food supplies are low in town. Electricity has begun to flicker back, but telephone land lines will likely be out of service for some time.
Alexandris’ niece, Maria Karamitsos in Chicago, said, “The only thing my aunt kept saying is, ‘The Greece that you know is no longer.'”
Karamitsos said the news was hard on her father, Gregory Fotinopoulos of Glen Ellyn, who was born in Greece. He talked to Alexandris by phone, and she told him that a family home in another village was in the path of a ferocious blaze.
“We just sat on the phone and cried,” Alexandris said. “And I sit here and ask: Why, why, why?”
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