ATHENS: Within the mud and particles of the flooded village of Metamorfosi in central Greece, 60-year-old farmer Athanasios Kostis is throwing out the recollections of a lifetime.
“All my recollections are right here. Now it’s all completely destroyed. We now have thrown out every little thing away,” Kostis advised Reuters.
Storm Daniel, Greece’s most intense since data started in 1930, swept by means of Thessaly for 3 days this month, killing 16 individuals – amongst them two from Metamorfosi – flooding cities and villages and turning the area into an inland sea.
A whole lot of residents had been airlifted or pulled out of flooded houses in lifeboats, crops had been washed away and tens of hundreds of animals drowned.
Weeks later, the water has changed into mud, revealing the devastation in villages akin to Metamorfosi, which had almost disappeared beneath the water.
Like Kostis, the greater than 300 residents of the village are primarily farmers occupied primarily with cotton cultivation, in addition to some corn and livestock.
Most of them have discovered shelter in family’ houses or by renting lodging in close by villages that didn’t flood.
“Now, nobody lives within the village. Everybody has left. All of them come throughout the day, they clear, they throw issues away, they wash the homes, after which they go away once more,” Kostis mentioned.
Within the empty streets of Metamorfosi, which in Greek means transfiguration, piles of residents’ belongings, framed work, furnishings, blankets and carpets, are the one spot of color within the mud.
The cemetery and buildings together with the Church of the Transfiguration of Sotiros, a non secular web site visited by hundreds of pilgrims every year, have suffered heavy harm.
The storm’s influence on Metamorfosi was so emblematic of the devastation that Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis confirmed footage of the submerged village when he met EU Fee President Ursula von der Leyen on Sept. 12 to request extra help from the European Union.
Kostis mentioned the village had been hit by a flood in 1994, however then residents had been in a position to return three months later. This time, it’d take longer, he mentioned.
“With 4 metres of water, it is going to be a bit tough to come back again till spring,” he mentioned.
