This summer, once again, Greece was burning. Since early July, wildfires – fed by record heat, drought and strong winds – have torn through Attica, Peloponnese, Crete, Kefalonia, Chalkidiki, and Salamina. More than 30,000 hectares of forest and farmland turned to ash. Firefighters and helicopter crews lost their lives doing the job that the state itself could not manage. Families stood and watched their homes, some of them built over generations, collapse into embers. In Agios Konstantinos alone, more than a hundred houses were lost in a single fire. In Salamina, two people were killed trying to defend what they had built with their own hands. Thousands had to be evacuated from Crete, from Kefalonia, from Chalkidiki, some of them carried off the beaches still in their swimwear by fishing boats and the Coast Guard, because by then the roads out were already full of smoke.
Every year it is the same story again: extreme heat meets a state that is not ready. The firefighting forces are still understaffed, still under-resourced. Money goes into announcements, into task forces, into reactive contracts signed after the disaster already happened; not to prevention, not to forest management, not to the kind of infrastructure that could actually slow a fire or get people out safely in time. This is not only a natural disaster. It is also a failure of governance, repeated so many times that we can no longer call it a surprise. All of this happens as part of a climate crisis that is not some future threat; it is already here. Forests are drier, the winds are stronger, the fires harder to control, every year a little worse.
We are watching this with a grief that feels doubled. The state has chosen, on purpose, to build its next migrant detention centre in the middle of the most important forest in central Lesvos.
Vastria sits in the middle of one of the densest pine forests on the island, a place with an extreme, well-documented risk of wildfire. For more than four years, the Greek Ministry of Migration and Asylum has kept pushing this project forward, through withdrawn and recycled environmental studies, technical redesigns, and by finding ways around court rulings. Meanwhile the underlying danger has never changed: a facility built to hold up to 5,000 people and 500 employees, with a badly designed evacuation route through the same forest, only one access road, and a “fire detection system” that reacts to fire, but does nothing to prevent it. Experts have warned about this again and again. And still, the state’s answer has only ever been a contract, never a real plan.
This is the same state that could not keep its own citizens safe from fire in their own homes, even with an entire national apparatus behind it and decades of warning. And now it wants to lock thousands of asylum seekers, families, children, people who have committed no crime at all, inside a forest it has shown it cannot protect, behind fences that will make it almost impossible to run in an emergency.
The wildfires show us an incompetence that puts everyone at risk. Vastria shows us something even worse: a willingness to knowingly place people under that same risk, people who have already faced so many dangers, people who do not have the right or freedom to decide on their own, because their safety was simply never a priority. If this summer taught us anything, it is that fire does not ask who deserves to escape and who does not. The people inside Vastria would have no way out.
We continue to call for the immediate and permanent cessation of the Vastria CCAC,to protect both the people and the forest. Our deepest condolences go out to those who have lost their lives or homes this year.
