Category: Uncategorized

by Annalisa Jenkins

A bulwark between the city and the mountain, The Volunteer Forest Protection and Firefighting Team of Ilioupoli is at the end of the road, literally on the frontline of climate change. As unprecedented heat and drought bring intensifying wildfires to Greece, the volunteers of Ilioupoli struggle to protect their forest under the command of a government that volunteers say doesn’t prioritize the preservation of unbuilt environments.

The Hellenic Fire Service, volunteer firefighter Maria Arva said, has three tiers of importance: human lives; then property; and finally nature. She agrees that human lives must be protected first, but gets frustrated when people build homes in fire-prone forests, and expect them to be prioritized over the nature that drew them there. For Arva, “You have to save lives. You have to save priority properties. But the forest is the most important for us.”

As wildfires intensify around the country, Greek fire response has focused on fire suppression rather than prevention. Faced with growing, harder to extinguish fires and the destruction of their land, some underfunded but dedicated volunteer firefighters like Arva have taken the work of wildfire prevention into their own hands.

The Greek branch of the World Wildlife Fund insists that a transition to fire prevention is essential. “We need to do things and activities in the forest to prepare them for summer, in order for them to be more resilient,” Panagiota Maragou, the Head of Conservation at the World Wildlife Fund Greece said. The chapter recently prepared a legislative proposal to use prescribed burns as a tool for fire prevention.

Cutting off low-hanging branches of trees and removing dead wood and underbrush would make forests less flammable, Arva said, making for easier wildfire seasons. The only problem is that it’s illegal.

By doing so anyway, the Ilioupoli team helped save the area in a 2015 wildfire, Arva said; flames didn’t reach the branches of the trees and, though they charred, they didn’t ignite, stopping further spread.

“We look at the mountain and see nothing but black,” volunteer firefighter Maria Arva said last week, with Athens’ Mount Hymettus looming behind her. The station was formed after a 1998 fire devastated the mountain, killing four. The 2015 fire was the second to rip down the same path. Blackened remains of pine trees still dot the hillside.

Arva is a journalist at the Greek TV station ANT1, but each summer, from May 1st to October 31st, she spends her free time fighting wildfires. The firehouse is a small wooden cabin with plump couches, a large television, and children’s art decorating the walls. Off the main living room is a radio system and several monitors, one showing footage from a nearby watchtower. Two white storage containers covered in graffiti stand outside, one with bunk-beds for late shifts, and one with personal equipment.

There isn’t a parking lot at the station; its two municipality-owned fire engines park at the end of the road. This is the first summer the trucks will live there full-time. Until this year, volunteers picked them up from the local Hellenic Fire Station each morning when the station opened, and dropped them back off at night. The team doesn’t have enough committed volunteers to staff the station all day, or all year.

Because the team doesn’t own their trucks, they can’t repair them, and Arva says that the municipality doesn’t treat them well. “They didn’t care for them, and practically they didn’t care about our lives being in that car.” The station’s main engine is from 1992, and each year of wear is evident in its dull exterior. Besides the trucks, the station otherwise relies entirely on donations for equipment.

Arva says the mountain cannot survive another fire. Pine trees don’t spread fertile seeds until they are twelve to fifteen years old, she said, and the regrowth from the 2015 fire is not yet mature enough to reproduce. “We will do whatever it takes not to be burned again,” Arva said. “It’s you do it” or the mountain is “destroyed forever.”

On a Cycladic island reimagined for profit, a realtor tries to preserve what made it livable.

By Valerio Castellini

People don’t have the same patience that they used to have. Then everything has to happen fast, and we change ourselves as people.

Sophia Katsipi sits behind a glass desk in her real estate agency in Parikia, the capital of Paros. The sun-bleached white walls of the office make it bright, faithful to the muted geometries of Cycladic architecture. “I renovated this myself,” she says. “This is my kind of input. I’d like to see more buildings like this.” A simple rectangular plan, minimalistic interior, and small, wooden windows. A style that has evolved over the centuries, as a result of the climatic demands of the islands. Sipping on an espresso while her white poodle circles the chairs, she mused about the island’s future.

“People from France, Switzerland, Belgium, northern Italy—they came here for the culture. They maintained the look of the island, they appreciated the traditional buildings,” she explains. “They passed on that same kind of culture to the next generation.” These visitors often stayed for months, eventually buying homes. Some relocated permanently. Most came in May or September, well before the streets of the island towns began to buckle under peak-season traffic.

But that was before Paros became an investment product. “The majority of investors, at the moment, look at the yielding,” said Katsipi. “They are not here to actually live on the island. They’re here to develop, sell, go—or redevelop, go again. They don’t really care about the effect on the island.”

Today, a wave of short-term investors, often with no plans to live on the island, are reshaping the market. Their priority is yield: building large, eye-catching villas—preferably with pools—to flip for profit or monetise through high-end rentals. 

“Paros is like a mini market,” she says. “We don’t have a brand name. I’m not sure what type of tourism we want.”

This shift has profound implications—not only for what is being built, but for whom Greece is attracting. “I don’t think culture has any connection with money,” she adds.

At the center of this transformation is a paradox. The more Greece tries to grow its tourism economy, the more it risks losing the very attributes that once made it attractive: affordability, authenticity, and embeddedness. What’s vanishing is not only traditional architecture or artisanal pottery, but a form of tourism that was socially and economically symbiotic. What Katsipi calls “cultured tourism” is being priced out—by policy decisions as much as by property sales.

“People don’t have the same patience that they used to have. Then everything has to happen fast, and we change ourselves as people,” Sophia explains, building on years of observing clients go through her office. “The majority today comes as investors, they look at the yielding.”

The reasons for this shift are multiple. With national and regional authorities slow to regulate construction and incapable of consistent enforcement, island professionals have found themselves standing in for absent institutions.

In 2024, Greece received over 35.9 million international visitors—more than three times the country’s population. Total tourism spending reached €21.6 billion, making the sector one of the country’s most vital economic engines. But on the Cycladic frontlines, those tasked with translating demand into homes, stays, and space are increasingly unsure of what kind of tourism they are building toward.

“We try to educate,” Katsipi says. “You might have a person that comes and says, ‘I want to build a villa with five-meter windows,’” she explains. Architectural guidelines in Paros and surrounding islands restrict window widths to prevent oversized, floor‑to‑ceiling glazing that can disrupt the Cubic white forms of Cycladic architecture. However, often these rules are bent—small illegal acts that accumulate across the landscape, slowly eroding its visual rhythm. “Even if you manage illegally to do something like this […] when you look at the island afterwards, it will look like a suburb of Athens,” concludes Katsipi.

In the current building spree, local realtors are left to navigate the gaps. “If the architect says, ‘Don’t worry, we’ll fix it,’ who am I?” Katsipi asks. “This job is difficult. You are always in between too many people— lawyers, notaries, engineers. […]  There’s only so much we can do.”

Still, many try. Katsipi helped co-found the island’s Realtors Association to promote ethical practices and defend against what she calls the “illogical logic” of state policy. In an industry where “my word is my signature” used to suffice, she now insists on contracts, disclosure, and transparency. “A business that’s not only for today, but for long-lasting, is based on ethics,” emphasises Katsipi.

Nowhere is the state’s contradiction more visible than in its approach to swimming pools. In Paros, private pools are banned outside town settlements—nominally to preserve water. Yet they remain legal within towns, where density is higher and infrastructure often weaker.

“It doesn’t make sense,” Katsipi says. “Outside town, in 8,000 square meters of land, you can build 280 square meters and have maybe three pools, max. But inside town, you can divide into 1,000-meter plots, build much more, and have four pools. It doesn’t make sense that it’s for water preservation.”

More broadly, this kind of prohibition, she argues, doesn’t reduce water use—it just fuels informal workarounds. Shallow “splash pools” are dug, then quietly deepened once the final checks have been conducted at the end of the construction process. Engineers are asked to certify legality, or to look the other way. Buyers are told not to worry.

“It’s prohibition that doesn’t correspond to legality,” she says. “It just creates another wave of illegality.”

And who gets to build legally, with full amenities? Hotels. Large developments. The very entities most capable of negotiating exceptions. “What you’re creating is cartel tourism,” she says. “You take the pools away from the normal villas where people come to for […] a bit of peace and tranquillity.” Tourists that are just looking for relaxation, that do not cram the streets. “Hotels have the right to build 30 rooms, each room with a pool,” Katsipi explains, raising the contradiction.

The real matter is that the island needs to decide what they wish to receive. Elite tourism? Mass tourism? Something in between? It has become clear that it is not possible to do everything at once.

Beneath these debates lies a deeper one about social sustainability. The form of tourism now prevailing in places like Paros has grown beyond unbalanced. It has become extractive.

When wealthy investors flip homes for profit, the local economy doesn’t grow—it inflates. Teachers and nurses can’t find housing. Essential services workers commute from other islands. Meanwhile, those who do buy homes are increasingly absent. “There’s a class of buyers who don’t even want to be here in August,” Katsipi notes. “They come in May-June or September-October. The rest of the time, the house sits empty—or is on Airbnb.”

This is not development. It is simply exponential growth. The distinction matters. Growth adds numbers. Development builds systems. At the moment, Greece has a surplus of the former and a deficit of the latter.

For Katsipi and others, the future of tourism in Greece won’t be determined by one regulation or one real estate deal. It will depend on whether the country—and especially its islands—can resist the temptation to sell everything to everyone. It will require choosing, clearly and collectively, the kind of tourism that is worth sustaining.

“It’s okay to have diversity,” Katsipi says. “But we have to decide where we’re going.”

By Valerio Castellini

I sit aboard Dimitris and Eleni Skiadis’s kaiki fishing boat in a quiet bay just south of Aliki. The sun lowers itself behind white Cycladic limestone, painting the scattered homes along the shore gold. A crane towers over a half-finished development nearby.

“These houses belong to an American,” says lifelong fisherman Skiadis, scanning the complex. “He brought his boat, too, and kept an American flag on it for months.” He adds: “Only two houses in this entire bay belong to locals.” A glance at Google Earth’s archives confirms him: most of the homes weren’t even here a mere 20 years ago.

Like many other Cycladic islands, Paros is struggling to keep up with the wave of gentrification that has striked the archipelago in the last two decades. Paros has led the Cyclades in building permits for five consecutive years—surpassing Mykonos and Santorini—and now ranks first in the region in square footage under construction. Plots and homes change hands rapidly—over 2,000 registered sales from 2020 to mid‑2024. The island, long hidden between its flashier neighbors, has suddenly become a speculative prize. Eventually, the fear is that the upsurge of these irreversible projects will destroy what once was a paradisiac escape.

Architect Angeliki Evripioti of Evripiotis Architects, who splits her time between Paros and Syros, watches these changes closely. She describes clients paying premium for large, glass‑fronted homes cut into steep slopes—“semi‑excavations” that double buildable area by slipping through legal loopholes. 

Traditional Cycladic terraces, once natural check‑dams against storm runoff, are paved over. “They have been traditional here for thousands of years, some of these walls are centuries-old,” explains Nicolas Stephanou from the Save Paros organisation. The result? When Paros endured its worst flash floods in 20 years this April, streets in Naoussa became mud chutes, and infrastructure strained under devastation.

“These buildings violate the topography and landscape of the Cyclades,” says architect Angeliki Evripioti, who has worked across Paros and Syros since 2010. She tries to balance minimalism with vernacular tradition—but it’s not easy. Demands have changed, together with the people that land in Paros. Now everything seems to be about profit, with no regards for the islands’ needs and long-term sustainability.

Architectural overreach had moved beyond aesthetic concerns, becoming increasingly entangled with questions of access and sustainability. “It’s like putting 100 people in a room meant for 10,” says realtor Filia Grigoraskou, president of the Realtors Association of Paros & Antiparos. The island’s infrastructure has not kept pace with its real estate boom: narrow roads buckle under summer traffic, and restaurant reservations are harder to find than building permits. Despite a 2012 urban plan that mapped out no-construction zones, no follow-up study was ever implemented. 

Many properties now under construction are actually based on permits issued before 2012. Older, more permissive criteria. After several extensions following the financial crisis and the Covid period, this might be the end of it. “People are trying to materialize their rights before they lose them,” explains Sophie Katsipi, a Parian realtor and member of the Association. The result is a last ditch building boom across Paros—particularly outside urban settlements, where large properties can still be developed under grandfathered rules. 

Simultaneously, the island’s basic services are thinning. “People coming to work in tourism are from everywhere—even overseas,” she notes. But those who sustain the local population—teachers, healthcare workers, municipal staff—are increasingly priced out. A town built for slow rhythms now struggles to serve its own residents.

There are efforts to market “authenticity”—to package Paros as a place of slow life and vernacular beauty. But even that can ring hollow. “Tourists don’t appreciate rural Paros,” Katsipi admits. “I don’t want another sushi place—I’ve had enough!”

By Annalisa Jenkins

On a hot June morning, Stelios Vathrakokoilis leaned against the bed of his pickup and looked out over the cracked fields on the Cycladic island of Naxos where he and his brother grow potatoes. He gestured over his shoulder and sighed.

“Fifteen days from now, this well will be completely dry,” he said. When the water runs out, he will be forced to irrigate with salty groundwater.

Having grown up in the 1970s and 80s, Vathrakokoilis remembers farmers making a good
living. Naxos potato seeds, known for the unique flavor from the island’s low-calcium soil, were coveted around the country.

Since the mid-90s, however, climate change has parched the island and over-tourism has poached agricultural land, workers, and water. A few decades ago, Naxos produced over 20,000 tons of potatoes each year, Dimitrios Kapounis, President of the island’s farming association, said. This year, he hopes it will produce three.

In 2024, drought left the island’s reservoir empty and the island’s hotels over-pumped their wells, leaving Vathrakokoilis’ dry. That year, he said he “didn’t plant a thing, absolutely nothing, because of the lack of water.” Vathrakokoilis’ work is threatened by climate change, which parches the island; over-tourism, which poaches agricultural land, workers, and water; and a culture that devalues farming.

Vathrakokoilis says the government has yet to fulfill its promise to put water meters on Naxos; there is no tool to measure or regulate how much the ever-growing number of hotels pull—the hot tub on one hotel room’s private balcony looks out over a large pool.

Over the past several decades, the island’s economy has become dependent on tourism: “if hotels don’t work in the summer, the farmers don’t work in the winter,” Irene Lianou, Reservation Manager at hotel Lianos Village, said.

“Tourists are fine,” Vathrakokoilis said, “we all profit from that.” But he needs the island to find a way to share dwindling water resources.

He has some ideas. If he had the money, Vathrakokoilis would install a water-efficient drip system to irrigate each plant directly rather than sprinkling the whole field. Since 2017, he has advocated for a waste-water system that would re-use millions of cubic meters of grey water for agriculture rather than dumping it in the ocean, bringing in water more cost-effectively than a desalination plant.

The project has seen little progress over the last eight years. Vathrakokoilis is frustrated by the country’s politics, which he thinks are more wrapped up in partisan infighting than passing policies that will help people. “This is crazy, we’re losing so much water,” he said.

Eleni Myrivili, who served as Athens’ Chief Resilience Officer from 2014 to 2019, agrees the Greek government could do more to address the problem. “I swear to you, nobody in the central government, and nobody in city government was talking about climate change,” she said in a recent interview of her time in the Athens office.

Now working for the UN, Myrivili says that globally, climate efforts are focused on mitigation, not the kind of acute adaptation projects that Vahtrakokoilis needs to keep his farm alive. He feels forgotten, that “no one cares for agriculture.”

Paros’ mayor, Kostas Bizas, who campaigned on regulating tourism, spoke of food production with resignation, suggesting an inevitable decline. While the government could subsidize equipment modernization, he says the fate of farmers is in the hands of local society, where they cannot compete with the prices of imported goods.

As the effects of climate change worsen and adaptation policies become increasingly necessary, Greece must decide if it will invest in climate adaptation for Cycladic farmers. Eleni Myrivili grapples with how lawmakers ought to decide what is worth saving, scoffing at new housing developments in Boston and Miami flood zones.

While not optimistic about agriculture’s future on his island, Mayor Bizas worries about tourism becoming its only industry; “You cannot totally rely on tourism, because it comes and it goes,” Mayor Bizas warns. Katarina Moschu worries that the boom of tourism will end, and that “the locals will have sold out their island and will be left with nothing.”

If his government does not invest to help him adapt to climate change, Vathrakokoilis is sure about one thing. “In a few years, there will be no agricultural production on the island.”

by Annalisa Jenkins

The pathway into the Hosios Loukas monastery is lined with the blackened skeletons of pine trees. They are remnants of a 2023 wildfire that breached the outer walls of the monastery, forced an evacuation, and came within inches of lighting the church aflame.

The trees stand in memoriam of what the monastery shopkeeper Yannis Loukas calls “one of the worst days in the life of this monastery.” The fire incinerated the monastery’s potato fields and hospitalized a monk who didn’t evacuate. 

But it was the vibrance below the burnt trees that drew my attention. In the two years since the fire, wild grasses and pink and white flowers have covered the dry ground lining the path: a pop of color amongst ashy yellows and browns.

Over the two days of our trip into the mountains of central Greece—in the monastery; among the ruins of Delphi; and at the site of a Nazi massacre in Distomo—the line between the past and the present blurs. Within a busy corridor of tourism, each of our hosts is grappling with how to honor their history in the face of great transition.

Father Anthimos, a monk who recently moved to Hosios Loukas, expressed mixed feelings about his reassignment. He came from Mount Athos, a traditional monastery that is closed to all but a few invited male visitors. There, he felt he was living a thousand years in the past. Our guide Sophia Theona explained that monasteries like Hosios Loukas, which invite tourists, are “not usually where a monk wants to be because they have to act as hosts, which was not their calling.” 

Hosios Loukas has preserved some of the monastic antiquity that Father Anthimos described. Its thick stone walls block the view of the road leading into it and muffle any sounds of traffic. The soft chirping of cicadas and birds, trickling mountain spring and well-maintained gardens create a bucolic peace. Gold embossed iconography lines the walls of the church and monks wear long black robes, a uniform that has remained unchanged for centuries. 

Within this image of the Byzantine empire, however, there are clear reminders of touristic modernity. A large black speaker is tucked into a windowsill beneath a painted bible scene; a small shop off the courtyard sells visitors honey and bars of nougat; signs in English hang on the stall door of a bathroom for women (who historically would not have been allowed into the monastery); a blonde toddler cries to her parents. Tourists hoping to learn about this Byzantine church have, inherently, changed its presence. 

After leaving the monastery, we drove to nearby Distomo, where, in 1944 the Nazis massacred 228 of the town’s 1600 residents. Amalia Papaioannou, head of the Distomo massacre museum and granddaughter of survivors, described how she feels a deep “duty to preserve the memory” of the tragedy. Growing up in the 1970s, Papaiannou was surrounded by stories of the massacre—“it’s not just a memory, this story being passed down has formed an identity,” she said. As the last generation of survivors passes away, her biggest fear is that this memory and identity will die with them. It seemed that for Papaioannou, our presence helped to keep the story alive—she thanked us deeply for listening. 

How do we honor memory while continuing to heal and live in the present? In the documentary we watched, one survivor, speaking nearly 60 years after the tragedy, lamented that “Distomo still hasn’t recovered. It still hasn’t recovered the peace and colours I remembered.” Is it possible to recover peace when, as Papaioannou said, her community’s identity is formed by a tragic memory? 

For each place our class played a different role—an opportunity for the preservation of history or the very thing against which they needed to preserve. Each stands on the precipice of a great transition.

The Hosios Loukas fire was the first that Yannis Loukas had seen in decades working at the monastery. As climate change brings intensifying heat and drought to Greece, it is likely that more will follow.