How can you rebuild everything from scratch?
There is a peculiar calm in Koskinas. The streets are empty and the summer silence is interrupted only by the sounds of construction work. A year after the deadly storm which destroyed around 70 houses in the Thessalian village and caused great damage to public infrastructure, residents are slowly and with great difficulty trying to return and rebuild their lives from scratch.
“There is nothing worse than not having a home. My husband and I have cried a lot. We had this house for half a century, I made everything. And just when we were starting to enjoy it, we lost it,” says 70-year-old Anna Hatzi. She and her husband Thomas lost everything last September: Their house collapsed and their animals – lambs and chickens – all drowned. Only they and their dog managed to escape. At first they stayed with their son in Athens and then in a house that a friend made available in Agios Theodoros, a village 20 kilometers from Koskinas. Anna, however, could not bear to be away from her village. She missed her daily life, cried and sank deeper into depression. She finally decided to return to Koskinas when, during an Easter celebration in Agios Theodoros, she felt unbearably alone. “All my friends were sitting with other friends or had their family with them. I had no one to sit with. I started crying. I went to my husband and said, ‘We’re leaving.’ I don’t care if we live in a hut, but at least I will be in my village, on my land.”
And so they did. The elderly couple used the money from the initial compensation, 10,000 euros, to gradually convert the old barn where they kept tools and animal feed into a small apartment. It took them five months. Some nights they slept on a mattress and a sofa in the yard of their demolished house. Anna can still make out her bed and the curtain she had sewn in the rubble. Now, the new home they have built has a kitchen, a new roof, a fireplace and a bedroom. They have been living there since May. “Here I see people I know. My mental health has improved. Here I laughed again,” she tells Kathimerini.
The bond with their village and the residents and the proximity of the village to their work – mainly agriculture and livestock farming – led several residents of Koskinas to attempt to return. “Some 60-70% of the residents have returned, but they live under difficult conditions,” says Mary Tsioutsia, president of the village cultural association. Some decide to fix one or two rooms in their homes, while others – like Anna and Thomas Hatzis – have converted farm buildings into homes. However, the village is far from back to normal. Several residents still rent in surrounding villages, some local shops and cafes remain closed, while one can still see several destroyed houses and cars in the area.
‘We want our lives back’
Tsioutsia has not yet been able to return to her home, which was flooded and suffered significant damage. She rents a house with her husband in Palamas, saying that the money the state gave them for household items was not enough to proceed with the repairs required to make their house livable again. It upsets her when she visits the house she lived in in the village, now empty, with bundles full of old things in the rooms. She will be able to return when she receives the housing aid, for which she submitted a request and which she estimates will be sufficient to do the necessary repair work. Tsioutsia says that although she has not received the repair aid she has also stopped receiving the rent subsidy, which has put financial pressure not only on her but also on many other families who are having difficulty returning to a much-desired normality. “We want our lives back. I expected that things would be better a year later and that politicians would be consistent with the promises they had made.”
‘There is nothing worse than not having a home. We had this house for half a century. And just when we were starting to enjoy it, we lost it’
In an effort to revive the joy and bond among the local residents, the president of the association organized the village’s annual celebration, called Papadiamantea, on August 23. “We were concerned, but the people came. We also invited politicians to whom we told our problems,” Tsioutsia said.
Conveying a personal and collective anxiety, she said that the residents are quite worried about whether the anti-flood works will be completed on time and whether they are are wrong to be rebuilding their houses from scratch before they are. “It’s starting to rain and we’re all scared,” she says.
The same insecurity is shared by Triantafyllia and Konstantinos Panagiotopoulos, who at the ages of 82 and 85 respectively have also had to rebuild their house from scratch, in one of the villages most affected by the storm, Vlochos. “The embankments have not been built. What will we do if it rains like that again?” they wonder. Although the decision to return to their village is still pending, the elderly couple could not afford the cost of rent in Karditsa and decided to rebuild their house at the entrance to the village.
Artemis Raikou, who lives a few streets down, is trying to do some small repairs around the house by herself. At the moment she is being hosted by her daughter, who lives on the second floor of a building in Vlochos and thus was not affected as much by the flood. She doubts whether she will be able to rebuild her own home. She explains that she does not have the strength to do the repair work required herself since the money she received from the state is very little. Currently she had just installed some used kitchen cabinets. The storm destroyed her home, the house she had built next door for her mother, and all of her farm equipment. “Can everything be built from scratch? There are no psychological, financial or physical resources left,” she explains.
In the nearby village of Metamorfosi, the residents’ psychology is different. Although locals have agreed to a relocation of their village and the vast majority is in favor of the plan, the residents have made it a condition that their village not be expropriated, so that some buildings can be used as farmhouses in the summer months, and they can return to points of reference in their lives, such as the church, the square and the cemetery. Thanks to the efforts of the owners of one of the cafes to keep it open, the locals now have a place to meet and chat.
“Fortunately, Vaios [Dandos] opened the cafe immediately. He disinfected it, cleaned it. We wanted it. If I want to see two of my fellow villagers, this is where I come,” says the very active president of the local cultural association, Litsa Rita.
Indeed, the owners, Vaios and Fani Dandos, did not waste time. As soon as the waters receded and the roads opened, they rented a house in a nearby village and began work on the cafe. Vaios described how the water had reached the roof, destroying everything in the cafe. For two weeks they shoveled out the mud. Almost everything was thrown away. At the beginning of December, the owners reopened the doors of their business, which was also their main source of income.
“We didn’t expect people to come. We opened it for us, to get our life back on track. After making the decision to fix it, the villagers asked us what we were doing and then told us, ‘Open it.’ They would come up from Palamas only to come to our cafe. Everyone supported us,” Fani says.
They received support from volunteers as well as from strangers. The decoration of the cafe was donated to the couple by a customer, who said that she had the things at home and did not need them. “Even the prime minister came by our cafe,” the couple say, adding that it became important to have a vibrant focal point for the community.
The cafe also hosted the commemoration of their two fellow residents who drowned in the flood. At the entrance of the association’s premises, Litsa Rita placed a boat which helped save many of her fellow villagers. “These days we think about it more intensely,” she said, hoping that the next year will find the people of Thessaly one step closer to the normality they suddenly lost, in a few days, a few hours, in September 2023.
