(no subject)

[alexbogd]

Вышел мой очерк про пожары в Греции. Спасибо demch, с которой мы его вместе "докручивали".

АР дало отличные зарисовки, которые выкладываю
ARTEMIDA, Greece (AP) _ One week of devastating fires have ravaged Greece, burning through forests, olive groves, vineyards, villages and claiming 64 lives. With buckets, wet towels and branches, villagers and volunteers battled the flames. These are some of their stories from Greece's southern Peloponnese peninsula.
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ARTEMIDA _ Theoni Kostandopoulou, a 77-year-old mother of a firefighter, could see the fire coming toward her mountain village of Artemida from across the distant hills. Many fled from the village _ and some died. Kostandopoulou stayed, using a small plastic bucket to splash water on a large pile of firewood and her house all night as throughout the village, houses burned.
"The young left and the old stayed behind. We stayed alone," about three women and six men, she said.
"I sat here, on this cinder block, all night," she said. Every so often, she would walk to the village spring and fill a container with water from the tap, battling through the smoke to drag it back down the hill to her house.
"What could I do? Dragging the water along, I went back and forth, back and forth, from the night to the morning."
Then she would start again, dipping her small plastic bucket in the water and splashing the building.
"My eyes filled up with blood, my lungs with smoke. I threw up from the smoke," she said. "Now, my body is dead tired."
The grapes on the vines overhanging her balcony withered from the heat. The house across the street burned. She lost her olive and fruit trees, her vegetable garden on the outskirts of the village. But she saved her home.
Fear was not an issue, she explains.
"And what if I was afraid? What choice did I have?"
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ANDRITSAINA _ A wind-whipped wall of flames sped down the hill toward Savas Angelopoulos' new hotel, devouring the forest and sending burning embers flying through the air. There were no fire trucks, no water-dropping planes, no helicopters: Angelopoulos and his family were alone.
But they beat back the fire _ with hotel towels and buckets.
"We fought like lions, as a family, with a handful of friends," Angelopoulos said. "For three days and nights, we stayed and fought. Now I'm so tired I can barely stand up."
Angelopoulos and his wife, Chriso Parastatidou, stood to loose everything. They had thrown all their money into building the Apollonion Hotel _ and had no fire insurance.
"If you knew what I went through," Parastatidou said. "Seeing the fire and seeing we will be left in the street, and in debt, too."
They gathered all the hotel's towels, drenched them in precious water and used them to beat at the flames licking the very edge of their yard. A friend drove up a small water truck, and along with the few hotel guests who had not already fled, they beat at the flames and formed a chain to pass buckets of water.
"The buckets were moving like lightning," Parastatidou said. "The hands moved so fast."
Angelopoulos was almost killed, he says.
A huge tongue of fire leaped from a tree straight at him. He dove to the ground, and the flame passed above him, burning some of his hair but otherwise leaving him unscathed. Someone grabbed his arms and pulled him to safety.
"I was singed, but I was OK," he said.
Now, the fire is gone, leaving behind it blackened stumps of trees and charred earth to the edge of the hotel garden. But the fear remains.
Angelopoulos does not sleep indoors any more. He has moved a cot outside _ that way, if the fire comes again, he will be ready for it.
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MAKISTOS _ It didn't take long for the fire to reach this picturesque mountain village.
"You could see the smoke, then the flames," said Maria Pothos, who spent her summers in Makistos along with her brother, visiting their father. "In three minutes, it was in the village. ... There was an incredible wind."
Her father, Aristogeiton Pothos, had gone to the nearby seaside town of Zaharo. He heard about the fire and tried to race back to save his home. But the police had blocked the road, and were not letting anyone head up the mountain. When they eventually let him through, it was too late.
"When I came, it was burning," Pothos said. "Everything was burning. It was like the sky was upside down. You couldn't see the sky because of the smoke; you looked down (the valley) and everywhere, small fires burned like stars."
Just this spring, he finished building an extension to his house _ which dated from Ottoman times in the 18th century and had been restored.
"If I had been here, perhaps I could have saved it," he said.
Now, there was nothing left. The roof caved in, shattered tiles lying in piles on the ground. The wooden floor burned, the sink shattered, the windows melted. Only the gray stone walls remained. Of about 65 houses in Makistos, about 40-50 burned down that day.
"All our belongings are here, in these ruins," said his 19-year-old son, Yiannis.
But despite the destruction and the loss, his sister was grateful.
"It could have been worst," she said. "We could have died."