2023-10-11 17:05:00
It’s hard to imagine, but beekeeper Paschalis Christodoulou is standing in the middle of what was a beekeeper’s paradise. Until a month ago. Now all he sees around him is scorched earth and trees as far as the eye can see. “The bees’ house is no longer there,” he says measuredly. His paradise was engulfed in a hellish blaze at the end of August, and now all that is left is a blackened moonscape. All life is gone.
For more than two weeks, forests burned in the Greek region of Evros, named following the river of the same name in the northeast, on the border with Bulgaria and Turkey. This made the forest fire at the end of August the largest ever recorded in the European Union. The fire destroyed more than 93,000 hectares of nature, regarding as much as the entire Veluwe. A disaster for flora and fauna: part of the forest belongs to a national park. For example, that is the only place where all four European vulture species occur.
Poor area
In Evros, nature and activity are closely intertwined, and a significant part of the local economy also went up in flames this summer. And this in an area that, due to a lack of large-scale tourism, is already one of the poorest parts of the country. Thousands of cows, goats and sheep, kept for dairy and meat production, lost their lives. The olive harvest is already poor this year throughout Southern Europe, and the fire here also destroyed 130,000 olive trees, 60 percent of the total. And, beekeeper Christodoulou’s biggest concern: thousands of beehives.
“Three to five thousand were here,” he says. During this period, millions of bees normally collect food for the winter, which they spend in the hives. Honey production then begins in the spring. But now there is only the occasional fly buzzing around Christodoulou. If the government does not help quickly, for example by supplying food for bees from elsewhere, he will have a bleak future and will have to look for another job.
The government has promised to compensate farmers and other entrepreneurs in the area through thirteen measures. For example, with compensation, money for new machines and tax rebates. But that doesn’t mean the trees are back in the forest. In some places, fresh green blades are now giving some hope. But it is expected to take many years before there is any serious recovery.
Indispensable link
What is also worrying: bees are an indispensable link in nature here. After all, they ensure pollination of many crops. Below that of the mulberry tree. The leaves are the only thing the silkworm feeds on, following which it spins a cocoon of silk thread.
The animal therefore forms the pillar of another important economic activity in Soufli, a municipality of more than 10,000 inhabitants on the edge of the forest: silk production. It is no longer as extensive as it was during its heyday in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but there are still a few factories and workshops that produce the fabric. For shops in Athens, but also for the clothing industry in Milan, for example.
The silkworms are now imported, but they do eat the leaves of local mulberry trees. “Fortunately, they are quite greasy, so few were burned,” says owner Giorgos Tsiakiris of the oldest existing silk factory on the outskirts of Soufli. “But if the bees don’t come back, the entire ecosystem here will cease to exist.”
He suspects his factory will survive the setback. “We have been producing here for more than four hundred years, and in the region since Byzantine times. The silk belongs here. But others who do not have much knowledge and experience in this area may not make it.”
Dimitra Bourouliti is also not confident regarding the future. In the center of Soufli she has a shop where she sells silk clothing and souvenirs, and she has two more elsewhere in the village. Her concerns are not just regarding a possible drop in production. “My customers are mainly birdwatchers and other tourists who come to the region for the natural beauty of the forest,” she says, folding a scarf and placing it on a shelf.
Her shop is full, but there are no customers this followingnoon. “When the fires broke out, all the visitors left. And when will they come back?”, she asks rhetorically. Like others in the region, which has been shrinking for years due to economic setbacks, she is considering leaving because of the new blow. “I’m young, and I might do it. But I don’t want to simply run away. I would rather make the best of it, for the region.”
Also read:
Greek government suggests that migrants started the fire
The forest fires in the Greek region of Evros are the largest ever recorded in Europe. The government suggests that migrants started the fires.
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