This used to be a forest.

When I was ten, we went to live in a nice little house on Pendeli, the mountain. I was too young then and I didn't understand what we had done, but that was a forest area we had gone and built our house in. It wasn't even legal to build there. But my mother had bought the land from a Cooperative owned by the church. And the church, in Greece, besides owning most of the valuable land, is above the law.

When we built our house, there was another one a couple hundreds meters higher up the slope, and the next closer one was still farther away. Most of the houses there were big villas with high walls with broken glass on top, and I could never see if anyone lived there or not. The first few months we lived there, we didn't have any electricity, because the area was so remote, we couldn't get connected to the network. Same with phone and water. The Cooperative had cut streets, but only the major ones were tarmacked. The lights on the streets were only on half the week and that after the first year.

Down by the creek, several hundred meters in the valley below the house, there were the ruins of an old farm with a water mill. South of the creek, you could see the ruins of stables, pens and storehouses that must have dated from the 40s' at least. There was also an old house and a small church, defiled and decrepit. The mill was on the north bank of the creek and you could cross over to it by a stone bridge that looked pretty old, maybe older than the mill itself. On the mill tower, made of bricks and about forty meters high (that should be around 120 feet, if I remember correctly that a meter is about three feet...), square and slightly tapering towards the top, and at about 3/4s of its' height, on the face overlooking the creek, two circular edifices had been made with bricks placed in a circle. They looked a bit like daisies. They were set with marble. One had a date engraved, I think somewhere around the 1890s' and the other had some initials. And a masonic symbol, it goes without saying.

Under the tower, there were the remains of more storerooms, I suppose, and also of the room where the millstone must have been, all very badly damaged, by time, I presume, but it could have been the Germans, or an earthquake or the landowners' madness, or whatever. The tower was hollow, although the brick walls were pretty thick. You could get inside it, but there wasn't much to see. The machinery that powered the millstone was gone. The tower was connected to the slope behind it by a brick wall as tall as the tower itself. The wall was wide enough to walk on with some safety and get to the top of the tower, were there was a small terrace, enclosed by a low wall. A big, rusted, metal pipe was sticking out from the center of the terrace. It was connected to another pipe, just as big and just as rusted, which continued on the top of the wall, to the highest point of the slope behind the tower. There had once been handlebars planted in the brick, so that you could safely walk on the wall, but when I first got there, there were only some rusted stumps left. Some times, I would track the pipes' path through the forest. Most of the time it was easy because it was just following the creek upstream. Parts of it were burried in the ground and I think that's how it was meant to be and not that they got like that over time and lack of care, because they were made of clay- so that they wouldn't rust inside the ground. The pipe eventually led to a small waterfall, about a kilometer (half a mile) or more up the creek. There was another waterfall before it, but as it was at a lower level and a lot taller, and so harder and more dangerous to build around, they had prefered to build the tanks near the other one. Those tanks were still there and still filled with water, but the pipe had been blocked by debris.

The tanks gathered the water and carried it through the pipes to the water tower, where it fell with pressure from its' top, through the pipe, on the helix, or the wheel, that turned the millstone.

It took me years to figure that out, because no one had ever told me about mills with water towers. I thought that all water mills were little wooden shacks with a waterwheel by the side, like in childrens' books illustrations. At first I didn't even realise it was a water mill. I thought it must have had a wind-wheel, which had been lost with time. When I did understand it was a water mill, I then realised I didn't know what a water tower like that is called. It was mister Makis, my grandmothers' friend that taught me the word. I 'm not saying. Not many people know it. And it's nothing to do with water, or tower, in Greek. It's a beautiful word, it speaks of the motion of the water as it stops to contemplate the height it is hanging from, the moment it's about to fall. Not many people know it, because, not many people know what the water feels like when it's falling from the height of such an artificial, inverted geyser. Or, few people know that, because the others don't know the word for it. Because, who works with water mills today? That old mill had been abandoned for decades when I found it. Nobody has called the tower its' proper name, for decades. Once, somebody worked it so much that they knew a word specially made for it. Now the mill is ruined, there is no water in the tower and its' name is a dead secret that I keep in vain because nobody really cares to know it.

Near the mills' ruins, there is a much more modern house. It's enclosed in really high walls, but from the top of the tower and from the height of my mothers' house, you could see the horses inside its' yard. The house was always so covered by the trees, that I can hardly remember it. Anyway, I was looking at the horses.

The mill, all the buildings on both sides of the creek and probably all the land from the mill up to the waterfall with the tanks, must have belonged to a very important man. If he owned the mill, he must have owned the whole area and then the mill site and the land between it and the tanks, must have been only a part of his lands. Judging by the size of the buildings on the side of the creek opposite the mill, he must have had a lot of people working for him, at least ten to fifteen in the stables and pens, at least another six or eight for the mill and who knows how many more for the household. The house with the horses, then, was it all that was left of that land, to the family of that man? A tsiflikas, he must have been. You know, big land owner. Badd ass motherfucker capitalist pig and all.

There was a very definite zone you could see around the house with the horses, where nobody built and even the roads were not covered with tarmack and there were no street lamps, for all the thirteen years I lived there. I understand that was the land owned by the people of the house. All that was left of the tsiflikas' land? The best part of it, for me, was the pine grove behind the mill and a few hundred meters away to the north-east. It was the thickest part of the forest, down in the valley.

There used to be a forest, in Pendeli. The whole mountain was covered in pines.

Then there was the fire.

When I grew up, I used to wake up in the mornings, or, well, I would have just come back home early, and I 'd watch the sun come up from behind Eovoia, across the gulf to the east. I could see the sea from there. And at that time of day, there was always mist, down at the creek. I swear it seemed to hang around the tower in particular. An old friend, perhaps.

I would have a look at all that and say to myself, no matter what goes wrong, this is never going to go away. It will always be here. I will always be able to come back to it and look at it and then everything will be OK. And even if I can't come back, I 'll keep it inside me and visit my memory of it and feel secure that even when my memory fades and I die, this will go on and the world will still be a beautiful place.

But it's gone now. I had trouble figuring out how, or why, because I couldn't understand who could have anything to gain from burning it down, like they did. Even after the fire, I could'nt understand. The whole mountain burned, from Nea Pendeli to Pikermi and from Pallini to Dionysos, tens of thousands of hectares of forest, in places where nobody is going to build for at least fifty more years, in parts of the mountain that nobody can seriously expect to buy from the state, because that would be so blatantly illegal that it just wouldn't happen and it would provoke a fit of outrage from even the most corrupt state officials no matter how high the bribe offered. I guess it was just an accident after all. Oh I don't mean the fire, I mean the way it got out of hand and didn't stop until it had consumed everything it could. That couldn't have been intended. Especially the people who expected to buy (and resell) parts of the mountain would have wanted it to be... presentable... desirable... They wouldn't have wanted the whole place to look like the ash-covered desert it did after the disaster. So, I understand now it was an accident.

As to who started it and whose hands it was that it got out of... Well, the Cooperative owns Drafi and the church owns the Cooperative and all the Cooperatives that own other areas near Drafi, like Pikermi and Kallitechnoupoli, that had also been built over, at the time before the fire. You couldn't have seen those places if you watched the marathon, this summer. But they were all just north of the marathons' first ten kilometers. Before the Olympics, we had our elections, here in Greece, I seem to remember it was some time around Easter. The new government passed a law voted by the previous government, which it had fiercely attacked before the elections as a deforestation law. That law legalises as urban area fit to build on and integrate into the city plan, all the area that had been a forest before the fire but is now scrub, that is, all the area that the fire burned. It's only been ten years since the fire and that is simply not enough time for the forest to grow back. It would take a hundred years for the forest to reclaim its' ashes. But by then, the land it used to occupy will have been covered by the city. In a hundred years from now? Oh, by then, the city will have spread all the way down to the beach of Marathonas. The tomb, I assume, will then be the center of a mall, or at the very least a commemorative square.

And the land owned by the Cooperatives, which was illegally inserted to the City Plan (in exchange for a few plots in the big deforestated urban zone in heaven, I suppose), the new law admits it as a fully legal part of it. My mothers' house and all the other houses in Drafi and the other illegally built areas, are now legalised. With amazing foresight, we had gone and built on future scrubland.

I was wondering if, maybe, the fire had something to do with the people of the house with the horses, the heirs of the property of the owner of the mill. They were sort of a Gaul Village, you know, the way they were there before anyone else discovered Drafi and thought "what a nice place to build in". They had their house, the mills' ruins, some olive tree groves and they left the forest well enough alone, because they didn't need to destroy it- but, they must have been so annoying to some people, because they were rich bastards, weren't they? Well, were they? I don't know. If they had been so wealthy, they 'd had been more powerful, if they had been what their family once was, why couldn't they do anything to stop the Cooperative encroaching upon the land that used to be theirs? Maybe they had had to sell land, because they were in debt- or just greedy. Maybe they were the ones who originally sold the land to the Cooperative, actually. Or it could have been seized from them, by the Cooperative with the support of the church. And maybe the forest was burned to end some kind of legal dispute between the people in the house and the Cooperative. I don't know those things and I don't know if I 'll ever have the courage to ask the right questions, even if I do find the right people to ask them.

And even if one day I find out for sure who burned the forest, what am I going to do? Burn a church? Impale the Archbishop on a branch of a pine that burned in the fire that ended the forest? Rape the owner of the Cooperative and fill his anus shut with Pendeli-pine resin? And what will that change? Somehow, no matter what I can say or do, the Greeks will just not stop burning their forests. The words just don't reach them, because they can't see how true they are. All they can see, is the money that the expansion of the capital, the greatest city, is bringing them. Masons, indeed. They won't stop building, because they don't know what else to do. They don't even believe it when you tell them how that is going to affect their children and I bet they think of their children, because people who make money and acquire power always think of its' future and the hands in which it is going to come to. But if they keep it up that way, if they keep burning and building in that pace, there won't be anything left to burn in two generations from now. This is not an exageration- it's an understatement. I 've been in at least six forest fires in my life and I 've seen ten times as much on the news. That's way too much for a land that ancient as mine. Once there used to be thick forests covering almost all of the mainland, in Greece. The people who built the acropolis in Mycenae, had seen lions and Aesop talks in legends about them too and our myths and stories are filled with deers and boars and even more lions. All of those animals lived in forests, big enough to sustain them, obviously. But Mycenae itself was abandonned and one very probable reason is that, having burned the forests around them to farm, they found that their farms coulnd't sustain them anymore because the earth couldn't hold enough water to grow crops to feed the Mycenaeans' ever-growing population. Athens is surrounded by mountains- five of them, Pendeli, Parnassos, Parnetha, Aegaleon, Hymettos. Of them, only Parnassos and Parnetha are still green and even they have been burned several times since I was born. Already, the Athenians can feel the consequences on their everyday life. Every time it rains, in Attica, the streets turn to rivers and some areas, the ones at the lowest ground level, just flood over. Every year, we actually have casualties, people who drown at the floods. In Athens, one of the biggest cities in the Balkans. That water, which drowns us, is on its' way to being lost to us because it ends up to the sea and at times of drought, we suffer from the lack of it, so the government has to issue warnings and ask for restrained use. And there are fields of crops outside the city, chicken farms in Megara and vine farms in Markopoulo. If they don't directly contribute to the citys' food supply (all the cerals, our dairy products and some of our porc and beef, come from Thessaly and Epiros), they certainly provide a large part of the citys' income from trade. But of the 7 million of the people penned up in this city, only about 1% can understand that, because the rest have never worked in a farm and all they know is they go to the supermarket or their green-grocers' and buy anything they want and then go to their office jobs or their Universities or their Colleges (where they learn about how to get an office job) and all they know about how food actually grows from the earth, is some distand bullshit they can vaguely remember from their first days in elementary school.

This is where the panic seizes me and I think that language and the way it helps us pass down knowledge about what keeps us alive and prospering is overrated, useless. Everytime I think of those things, everytime I try to write about them, I 'm hard pressed to find words that have not been raped to oblivion by the politicking of the Ecologists, and that scares me the most. Because it means, all the resources I have at my disposal, to nudge people, to wake them from their torpor, have been used and abused to the point where they've become a mere dronning noise that simply annoys people who have heard it over and over again untill it doesn't mean anything to them anymore and it just lulls them to a deeper deadly sleep. The truth is now classified in peoples' minds as just another political groups' rhetorics, therefore, lies, only used to promote their own financial and political interests. Which, of course, have nothing to do with protecting our resources.

We 're so good at making money. But we 're so bad at economy, aren't we?

And once we get what's coming to us- the desert, that's already growing fast, once this beautiful place of sun and sea starts looking too much like the kind of scenery you can see in Operation Desert Storm and its' sequel, Operation Shock and Awe... what about our income, then, that's completely dependent on tourism, the only reason why we were accepted in the EEU in the first place? Yes, what then?

It's not even a consolation that I won't be around to find out. Or that I won't ever have any children to grow up in the desert. Because this is my country, damn it all to hell. And I love it. Yes, me, I love my country.

And it's drying up.

What else is there to say?