Attica Wildfires Burn Olive Groves Around Marathon
The wildfire that broke out northeast of Athens on the night of Friday, August 21, burned for four days and, by the time it was contained on Monday, had destroyed some 21,000 hectares of pine forest, olive grove and farmland, according to the Associated Press. Here is what burned, what a scorched olive tree can still do, and why this fire is unlikely to move the price of Greek oil even as it ruins individual growers.
What happened
The fire took hold late on August 21 near the Marathon plain. Strong winds drove it toward the edge of the capital, and by the next day NASA’s Aqua satellite was picking up a smoke plume that stretched more than 100 kilometers out over the Aegean. Marathon was among the first places hit: houses were lost and the pine woods and olive groves around the town were burned out.
Over the weekend the front moved through Dionysos, Stamata, Rodopoli, Drosia and Agios Stefanos and climbed Mount Penteli, much of which was scorched right up to the peak. Homes in Palini and Drafi were damaged and two children’s hospitals were evacuated. Water bombers from Italy, Cyprus and France joined the Greek aircraft. When the flames were finally contained on Monday, August 24, officials counted at least 150 homes burned down.
The ancient sites around Marathon, including the museum and the temples at Rhamnous, were spared. The olive trees on the plain below them were not so lucky.
Why it matters to olive growers
Attica is not where Greece makes most of its oil. The bulk of the national crop comes from the Peloponnese and Crete, and a burned hillside on the edge of Athens is unlikely to show up in export figures or wholesale prices. That is the macro picture, and it is the one the trade will quote.
The micro picture is different. Groves on the fringe of a big city tend to be small holdings, often kept by families who press their own oil or sell a few hundred liters to neighbors. For them, a burned grove is not a percentage point; it is the household’s oil and a slice of its income gone for years. Two summers ago the Peloponnese fires taught the same lesson on a far bigger scale, when Greece’s olive oil producers faced a bitter harvest and whole villages lost the trees they lived on.
What a burned olive tree can and cannot do
An olive does not burn like a pine. It has a fleshy evergreen canopy and a swollen woody base full of dormant buds, and a tree that looks like charcoal in August will often push green shoots from that base by the following year. We looked at this after the forest fires that swept Lebanon’s olive groves, and the same biology applies in Attica.
Survival is not the same as a harvest, though. A tree that regrows from the base has to rebuild its whole crown before it carries a real crop, and that usually takes several seasons. Irrigation lines, terrace walls and access tracks burn along with the trees, and very old trunks that sit in the heat for too long can die outright.
- This year’s fruit on burned trees is lost entirely.
- Resprouting trees need years of pruning and patience before they crop again.
- Replanting from scratch means a longer wait still before a young tree pays its way.
How Greece is reacting
The political fallout started before the smoke cleared. Greek newspapers accused the authorities of repeating the coordination and equipment failures of 2007, while a government spokesman defended the operation as well coordinated. Around 500 firefighters and 300 soldiers patrolled the burned area to catch flare-ups.
For buyers of Greek oil, nothing changes on the shelf this season. For the growers of Marathon and the Penteli foothills, the useful questions now are practical ones: how quickly help reaches them, whether they can afford to keep burned groves worked while they recover, and whether anyone clears the brush that let the fire run in the first place.
After a fire, the pressure is always to bulldoze the black stumps and replant. Unless the trunk is clearly dead to the roots, wait one season and cut back to whatever sprouts from the base. An established root system regrows a crown far faster than a nursery sapling can build one, and a grove that someone keeps pruned and cleared is itself a firebreak.