Enkelados

Greece has a lot of earthquakes and I 've been in lots of them in my life. Nothing like the 9.0 Richters in Asia yesterday, of course. And in my lifetime there never was a tidal wave in the Mediterrannean. There was one in 1956, two decades before I was born, though. It hit the island Amorgos with waves 25 meters high and caused lots of damage in Santorini, Astypalaia, the Dodekaneses and the coast of Asia Minor. That's the area were a huge volcanic eruption destroyed the Minoan civilisation some 5000 years before today. It's were the Eurasian tectonic plaque and the African one meet and push each other around. In July 365 BC, it caused an earthquake that must have hit 8 on the Richter scale and a tidal wave that killed 50.000 people mostly in Egypt (according to sources of the time, of course), threw the ships from the harbour of Alexandria on shore, inside the city, caused the waters to retreat in the Adriatic sea so much that the ships there touched the bottom and it reached all the way to Sicily and modern Dubrovnick. Several other major earthquakes in the same area have caused tidal waves over the centuries, mostly not as big as that, though.

My first big earthquake was the one in Athens in 1985. I think it was 5 plus degrees Richter. I was very young then, but I remember what happened. My grandmother, who lived in the same building as me and my father, came over to our place and carried me downstairs to my aunts', because my father was out. Why they carried me downstairs and they didn't all come upstairs, I 'll never know. But they were making ready to leave the house in a hurry, so I guess it made some kind of sense to them. Anyway, I remember the scene very vividly. Too vividly, I guess. I actually recall an out of body experience from that night. I remember seeing myself from the outside, being carried by my grandma in her arms, as she was going down the stairs. I must have been asleep. When my aunt and uncle and cousins were all ready to go, we went outside and stayed in their car and kept listening to the news in the radio, waiting to hear if there were going to be any other quakes and wether it was safe to get back in the house or not. Lots of people stayed outside the whole night and there were several families who lost their homes to damage. I don't think we had any casualties, though.

The next biggest one in Athens was in summer 1999, and I was there again. I remember that one a lot clearer. I was sitting in my bed, reading or watching TV and then it started trembling and roaring. You can hear a very distinct roaring when you get big earthquakes and that one was over 5.9 Richters. It lasted about a quarter of a minute and that was time enough for me to sit up and look around bewildered, then jump off the bed and go stand underneath the bathroom door casing. I was living in a small studio then and there was only that door casing in the whole flat. I was in my undies and I had time to think what I could grab and throw on me fast enough to run if I had to. Then it stopped and I could hear sirens and car alarms going off ouside and people screaming and yelling. I had a small collection of beer bottles on the top of my kitchen shelves and they had all fallen to the floor, but not one had broken, for some reason, and they were at about six feet high. A big one and a half-litre Vondel bottle fell from that height and it didn't break. Just how could that happen, I 'll never know.

I tried calling Ada who was in Corfu, but the lines were dead- everybody was trying to call their own and we had overloaded the network. And the power was out. I got dressed and went outside and it looked like everybody was on the streets. There was debris fallen from the oldest buildings, strewn all over the place. I went to our favourite coffehouse and I met a girl there who had just bought a neo-classic house, one of those old Athenian houses that were built at the beginning of the 20th century, some even earlier. There's been a trend, for some time, people buy these and rennovate them, and they can be made to look real good, but they 're not that sturdy, compared to newer ones. The girls' house, I think I remember her name was Maya, she said to me she was inside the house doing some paint jobs and stuff and the ceiling almost fell on her. I know the house she was talking about and I 've seen it since- it's a ruin. Of course, since 1985, everything is built with special anti-earthquake specifications so none of the more modern buildings collapsed. At least, not downtown. Later, when the power came back, I opened the TV and I saw the news: there were three or four bussiness buildings and small factories that had collapsed, around Menidi, the suburb under Aegaleon. There were people trapped underneath and by the end of a week, not all of them had been retrieved alive. Lots of people lost their homes, in that quake. The first couple of years, the government promised they were going to get all the help the state could offer, but most of them still live in containers. And some of the schools in the areas that were hit the most, still operate in containers.

Last summer, again, I was in Corfu with Ada and her mom, Cleo. We had just come back from a trip in Lefkada, a week before. I was sleeping in my room and I woke up from the roaring and the tremor. I opened my eyes and it didn't stop. I sat up and it still went on. I put something on me and jumped up and ran to the door and it was still trembling. Ada was at her door and Cleo joined us in a moment, all panicky and then the quake stopped. It had lasted about 11 seconds but it sure seemed like a lot more to us. Actualy, what we felt was not one but several earthquakes, one basic one and a lot of after-quakes of diminishing magnitude, but they were all so close to each other that it really felt like one big one. It rated at about 4.5 Richters again. In Lefkada, where it hit the most, it left thousands of people homeless and utterly destroyed their tourist season (which is their main source of revenue, as in the rest of Greece, of course) and obliterated most of the old town. The old town was built quite flimsily, to tell the truth, it was more like a glorified shanty town than a real city. In Corfu we didn't have any damage, but it was scary anyway. Adas' place is quite old and I remeber when I woke up and as I was lying on my bed staring at the huge beam over my head, I was thinking "oh, shit, it's gonna fall". It didn't, of course, but it was weird how the quake seemed to go on and on for ever. I remember I thought at least three times "hey, OK, it's lasted long enough, it's gonna stop now" and it went on after that.

I remember they were telling us about earthquakes at school. That's were they told us that the best chance you 've got is to go stand under a door casing, or a good concrete beam. They told us how quakes start and what to do in case we were buried under a building too (well, it was mostly, pray and don't panic, try to listen for search parties and be prepared to scream at the top of your lungs to make them hear you. But you can also buy little key-holder sets of whistle and flashlight everywhere, here). That's a bit of a surprise, because they never taught us how to behave in a fire, for example, although they did give us some exercises from time to time (like, once every five years). But, about earthquakes, they told us all there was to know at school. I think most Greeks can estimate pretty accurately the magnitude of a quake along the Richter scale. Of course, another reason for that is that we get a lot of minor ones every now and then so there's plenty of opportunity to compare between weaker and stronger. But, then, we 've never had a bigger than 6 Richters in Greece in my time, so if we ever get one of those, heaven forbid, I doubt we could tell the difference between, say, 8 and 7. On the other hand, I remember when the 1999 one stopped, I was like "oh, this was a big one". If it was bigger than that, I 'd have gone "holy shit, are we still standing" and anything bigger than that I 'd just scream and shit my self, so I guess, there's a kind of accuracy there, but only when you employ hindsight...

Anyway, last time I checked the news, there were 20.000 people dead from the Tsunami in Asia. I guess all I can say is that it really sucks. And, of course, it's always the poorest people who get hit the worse. I mean, shit, Bangladesh? Sri Lanka? Myanmar? As if they didn't have enough troubles already. It's like some god has spit on them people and cursed them to suffer every calamity possible. No, this really sucks. Wish there was something we luckiest bastards could do to help out... Like, you know, give a shit, for example... Ah, whatever, at least the EEU sent some money. Money. Hm.