Harrowing testimonies about Mati fire
Witnesses bemoan complete absence of state during trial for deadly 2018 wildfires
Survivors of the wildfire that swept through the seaside resort of Mati in eastern Attica in 2018, leaving 104 people dead, scores of injured and mass devastation, have described a hellish experience during the trial of 21 defendants including the former Attica governor, and high-ranking municipal, civil protection, fire service and police officials.
The heartbreaking testimony of Varvara Voukakis, who lost her husband and two children, brought many in attendance to tears.
“My husband went out to Marathonos Avenue to see what was happening… He called me. He was terrified because the fire was approaching menacingly… I was calling Grigoris [her husband], the kids on their cellphones, but they weren’t picking up,” she said. “At one point my son picked up his father’s phone. The kid was terrified. He told me he was in the port of Mati, that there were explosions and it was a chaotic situation. ‘I’m scared, Mom!’ he told me. I told him I was trying to come and find them. He said, ‘Don’t come, we’ll come,’” she added. “He was scared and I wasn’t there.”
“I was calling Grigoris. Sometime around 6.30 p.m., when he answered the phone, he was screaming. ‘We’re burning!’” she said. When she finally reached Mati she said the state mechanism was “nonexistent.” “There was nothing. The smell of burning, darkness, dead silence! There was nothing left alive. People looking for their people… The cars on top of each other. There were charred people inside,” she said. She then headed to the port of Rafina when a port authority officer told her they had found a little girl. “She had a picture on her phone… I thought it wasn’t going to be my child. I saw the picture and it wasn’t a mistake, it was my Evita…” she said.
Theofanis Hadjistamatiou, whose wife and 4-year-old son suffered severe burns, said in his testimony that “those who lived that day lived by luck.”
“Ten seconds separated life from death as happens in war,” he said, decrying the complete absence of state services. “They did not do even the least. To give a quarter of an hour’s notice so that no one would be lost, so that they could reach the sea… Useless,” he said. “My wife was in hospital in unbearable pain. Alone. My child stayed in the hospital for 60 days and on morphine. He couldn’t lie down, his back and legs were burned. He had two surgeries… Psychologically, for four years now, he’s needed support. Since he was a baby, he’s matured rapidly,” he said.
