An opinion piece by NeaKriti journalist Mary Kariotaki looks at Samothraki, Arkalochori, Dadia and Argithea and finds a familiar pattern in the aftermath of disasters: prevention comes late, bureaucracy moves slowly, and responsibility becomes difficult to locate. At Argophilia, we think the argument deserves a wider audience.
A particular kind of Greek story begins with cameras, emergency crews, and politicians in hard hats and ends years later with residents still waiting.
The disaster itself is immediate. The rebuilding is not.
That is the thread running through a powerful recent opinion piece by Mary Kariotaki of NeaKriti, who looks across four very different parts of Greece — Samothraki, Arkalochori, Dadia and Argithea — and asks what happens after the television crews leave.
Her answer is uncomfortable, but difficult to dismiss entirely: the country’s most vulnerable communities can remain stuck in recovery long after the national attention has moved elsewhere.
She identifies three recurring problems worth putting at the beginning of the conversation.
Three Problems Keep Appearing
1. Prevention comes after the disaster.
Kariotaki argues that infrastructure and environmental protection too often receive serious attention only after something has already failed — whether that means a flood, earthquake or wildfire.
2. Emergency situations get trapped inside ordinary bureaucracy.
Procedures designed for normal circumstances can take years when entire communities need homes, public buildings, roads and essential services restored.
3. Responsibility becomes a game of ping-pong.
When responsibilities are divided between ministries, regions, and municipalities, residents can find themselves dealing with a system in which everyone has a role, but nobody seems to have full responsibility.
Those are Kariotaki’s conclusions, not ours. But the examples she uses give the argument some uncomfortable weight.
Samothraki, Nine Years After the Floods
Kariotaki begins with Samothraki, where she spent recent days marking the anniversary of the devastating floods of September 26, 2017.
Nine years after the disaster, she notes that a programming agreement for the island’s Health Center was only recently signed, while problems with the town hall and roads remain part of the local story.
The issue here is not simply whether one particular project took too long. It is what the delay represents for a remote island community that already has to deal with distance and limited access to services.
Kariotaki recalls a resident remembering the arrival of the then President of the Republic in boots after the floods, with locals assuming that the damage would be repaired within a month.
They were wrong.
The cameras arrived quickly. The rebuilding did not.
Arkalochori, Five Years After the Earthquake
The same question is being asked much closer to home in Crete.
The devastating earthquake of September 27, 2021, left Arkalochori and surrounding communities facing damaged homes, businesses, schools and public buildings.
Five years later, hundreds of people are still living in temporary accommodation.
NeaKriti reported this week that around 500 people still live in containers and “yellow” homes, while many buildings await repair or demolition. The same report describes businesses that never reopened and reconstruction held back by administrative procedures.
For the people living through it, “temporary” has taken on a different meaning.
A temporary home is temporary when you know when you are leaving.
When years pass, it becomes simply home.
And that has consequences beyond buildings. It affects families, businesses, schools, neighborhoods, and a community’s ability to imagine a future.
Dadia and Argithea
Kariotaki extends the comparison beyond Crete.
She points to Dadia, where the destruction from the 2023 wildfire remains part of the wider discussion about recovery and forest management, and to Argithea, where mountain communities face damaged roads, streams, and infrastructure.
The landscapes are completely different. The pattern she identifies is not.
A remote island in the northern Aegean, a σεισμόπληκτη community in Crete, a forest region in Thrace, and mountain settlements in central Greece have little in common geographically. Yet what happens after the emergency connects them.
What Tourists Rarely See
Tourists tend to experience Greece through its functioning surfaces: airports, ferries, roads, hotels, archaeological sites, restaurants and beaches. But the same infrastructure serves the people who live there year-round, and when it fails, residents cannot simply go home after their holiday ends.
A visitor may see a beautiful mountain village and never notice that the road connecting it to the nearest hospital is vulnerable to flooding.
They may stay on an island without knowing that its health center has been waiting for improvements.
They may visit a Cretan town and see a perfectly ordinary street without knowing that the building next door has remained damaged since an earthquake.
That is why recovery is also a tourism issue, even when nobody puts the word “tourism” into the disaster-response plan.
A resilient destination is one where residents can live safely after the visitors have gone home.
The Bigger Problem Is Not One Disaster
Kariotaki’s most powerful observation is therefore not really about Samothraki, Arkalochori, Dadia or Argithea individually.
It is about whether Greece has learned to treat recovery as part of disaster management rather than as an administrative afterthought.
The distinction matters.
Emergency crews can arrive within hours. Political leaders can visit within days. Funding announcements can follow.
But rebuilding a house, reopening a school, repairing a road, or restoring a health facility can take years.
And when that happens, the disaster doesn’t really end for the people living there.
It simply changes form.
Greece’s Rural Communities Cannot Live Permanently in the Aftermath
Remote islands, mountain villages and inland communities were already dealing with aging populations and the departure of younger residents before disasters struck. When reconstruction then takes years, the pressure to leave becomes even greater.
A family can wait only so long for a home to be repaired. A business can survive only so long without reopening. A young person can postpone their plans only so many times. Eventually, people leave.
And once they do, rebuilding the physical infrastructure becomes only half the job. You also have to rebuild the community.
An Uncomfortable Argument Worth Having
Mary Kariotaki’s article is an opinion piece, and it is deliberately sharp. Read her criticism of the state’s response as her assessment, not a neutral institutional audit.
But that does not make the underlying questions less important.
How quickly should essential infrastructure be restored after a disaster?
Should emergency reconstruction follow the same administrative timelines as ordinary public works?
Who is ultimately responsible when several levels of government share authority?
And perhaps most importantly:
How long can a community remain “temporarily” displaced before temporary becomes permanent?
Those are not uniquely Greek questions. But Greece’s geography makes them particularly important. The country has hundreds of inhabited islands, extensive mountain regions, remote villages and communities exposed to earthquakes, floods, wildfires and increasingly difficult weather conditions.
The disaster may last a day. The recovery can last a decade.
Argophilia Takeaway
We spend a great deal of time talking about making Greece a better destination for visitors. We should.
But there is a simpler test.
Can the people who live there recover when something goes terribly wrong?
Because the Greece tourists love is not made only of beaches, archaeological sites and picturesque villages. It is made of people who live in those villages, work in those towns, raise families on those islands and keep the country functioning long after the holiday season ends.
If recovery takes years, the cost is not simply financial.
It is measured in homes that remain empty, businesses that never reopen, young people who leave, and communities that slowly lose the ability to recover at all.
That is the uncomfortable Greece Mary Kariotaki is asking readers to look at.
And perhaps it is worth looking.
Source and original opinion: Mary Kariotaki, NeaKriti, “Όπου κι αν κοιτάξεις η πραγματική Ελλάδα σε πληγώνει..” published September 27, 2026.
