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In this month’s column I will
address the environmental issue, because the respect for nature is relative
to the learning each one has had, and which will determine to a large degree
the individual’s choice for a healthy, or not so healthy, stand towards
environmental matters.
Today, one is rarely able to
experience enjoyable moments in places where the face of nature has not been
altered by all sorts of human intervention.
Together with some friends, and
following a long-ago dream, one recent Sunday I tried to walk through one of
the most beautiful, and also the most fallen and neglected natural spots, in
our township . . . the Aghia Anastasia Gorge.
I would have to devote a plethora of
pages, in order to fully explain the existing situation.
However, I will try to point out the
most pertinent facts in the limited space of a newspaper column.
The gorge ends at the Gournes
village and begins at the New Village of the Episkopi Township,
while it takes its name from the church-cum-cave at the beginning of the
gorge. Here, I shall not rest on pompous descriptions befitting last
century’s foreign visitors to
Greece. I will stand on three points
gloriously revealing how the mind of the insatiable profit-minded beast
works, and how it has over-taken the contemporary development-minded man.
1) The gorge has been destroyed by
the action from the Anopolis quarry. In many points of its bed, the ground
has risen as far as two meters from gathered rock-dust and pebbles.
Stones from the quarry in the gorge
2) Here, I would like to point out
that the gorge hosts many remarkable petrified fossils which have been
covered, not only from the above-mentioned materials, but also from enormous
rock boulders catapulted there during the near-by road-opening procedures
from some unscrupulous owners.
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Boulders catapulted
into the gorge
3) The natural springs, Kria Vrisi and
Kolymbos, have disappeared due to
muddy pile-ups. Unfortunately, the younger among us end up realizing how
offensively we have acted towards areas which flourished in the past, and
have turned from small on-earth paradises to half-dead areas.
And, of course, it all seems to have
occurred with the blessings of the church, since the properties where the
damage-oriented quarry companies work belong to the church.
Presently, I can still envision my
grandfather harvesting his beehives together with the Father Superior from
the monastery, while near by the almond trees of a neighbour were in full
bloom.
I can even still fathom the
existence of a stalagmic cave,
Hirospilio, mentioned by
Eleftherio Pataki, just a bit further from the gorge, which was blown up
while mining the rocks from the quarries.
Now, the cross still stands at about
the middle of the gorge, on the Seli
Peak, straight across from the Ai
Yianni Monastery (an effort from my dear departed father to remind his
village, where the Turks threw over the monks during the 1896 revolution).
BUT IN THE FUTURE, I DON’T KNOW WHAT MY SON WILL REMEMBER
FROM ALL OF THIS.
My anxieties are furthered by the fact that additional long-term property
rentals are planned for the monastery lands next to the existing quarry,
ignoring pre-existing decisions from the prefecture and local governments
expressing a negative opinion in affixing the Gouves and Anopoli Townships
as quarry areas, after powerful opposition from the local society.
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