The sky is a hazy cobalt blue, sharply edged by stark limestone cliffs rising from an azure sea. The sun flashes on its choppy surface, contrasting with the patches of purple shadows cast by drifting white clouds. Above the sea, green hills roll past ancient olive orchards toward distant stands of pine and oak. From the coast road’ narrow dusty trails wind through the folds in the hills, skirting rocky crags passing through tiny villages with their burnt-orange roofs and whitewashed walls.

This is Kassandra, one finger of the Halkidiki Peninsula that pushes into the Aegean Sea from northern Greece. This narrow, beautiful peninsula in northern Greece is in the path of hordes of tourists coming down from the north of Europe for their summer vacations. Can the fragile coastal environment, little villages and archaeological remains survive this onslaught? At present, it looks doubtful.

Financed by a NATO grant to study the environment, and particularly the environmental degradation brought about by intensive development, my colleague, loannis Tsalikidis and I were to observe firsthand the battle between environmentalists and tourism developers. Tourism is clearly winning.

The government here underwrites the tourism industry, reeling travelers to Greece with seductive lures; package tours, slick cruises and island-hopping bonanzas. Until recently, northern Greece managed to escape the jet-set aura, deemed more appealing to the vacationers from Thessaloniki, an assortment of tent campers and families on holiday from the rest of Greece and the Balkans. After the ouster of the military junta in 1974, the Greek government petitioned the World Bank to fund a major tourist development in Halkidiki. The next five years saw a rapid growth of modern, high-rise hotels and tourist resorts, 90% of which were built on Kassandra. Aided grandly by wealthy private investors, the Greek government poured 28 billion drachmae ($220 million) into hotel construction alone. Most of the development took place in or near the sleepy fishing villages of Kallithea, Hanioti and Kriopigi on the peninsula’s east coast. In the place where Thessalonians once spent their Julys and Augusts in the earthy rental villas and munched kalamari in rickety seaside tavernas, the newcomers?EUR??,,????'??+British, Austrian, German?EUR??,,????'??+expected and demanded much more. Thessalonian families continued to come, but the younger set jetting in on their packaged holidays, wanted full value for their money: discos, elegant clubs, restaurants and miles of uninterrupted beach fun.

The east coast filled in and developers turned to the west. Even greater opportunities existed here for exploitation.

Skala Fourkas. The hotel is wedged between two other beachfront enterprises and there is only a narrow view across the Bay of Thermaikos to the Greek mainland. The hotel owner shares a pot of dark, sweet coffee with us on the terrace. Haris Roidis is a hotel owner and a landscape architect, educated at Edinburgh University. His graduate thesis was written on tourism planning in Southern Greece.

We needed more convincing. What happens when profit comes into conflict with preservation of scenic beauty? Or even in the preservation of an historical structure? There is a tiny tile roofed shack in front of us, disintegrating walls festooned with postcards, color slides and cheap sunglasses. It also blocks much of the view to the sea. Roidis frowns at it. “There’s an example. For years I have tried to have that eyesore removed.” He rolled his eyes and sighed. “In Greece, everything takes forever.”

With Haris Roidis and his wife Hariklea, we drove north in the early afternoon along the coast road to the little fishing village of Siviri…a collection of a dozen or so weathered stone houses, half hidden in the coastal scrub. We parked under the shade of a large old apple tree, next to a rusting tractor, and walked across the sand through tall yellow grass to an open taverna facing the sea.

“Ah, but we cannot stand still,” Roidis said and pointed, “there by the tractor, we are going to build a four-story hotel…my father-in-law, that is.” He shrugged again. “Better us than someone else. Some Swiss or German bank.”

Later, we drove inland across the spine of the miniature mountain range, crossing the peninsula on narrow dirt roads that twisted through a forest of scrub oak and Aleppo pine. Roidis waved grandly at the scenery. “Now this we can save. No tourist ever comes up here.”

It was beautiful, natural, and in our mind just the kind of place a visitor ought to enjoy. We were able to identify three species of oak (suber, pubescens, patraea), wild olive, Aleppo pine and Judas tree. Roidis called them out enthusiastically. Pomegranate, once endemic to Greece, Sparto (our broom), Koumaria (the Strawberry Tree of California gardens).

Crisscrossing the fire roads, we reached a high point on the ridge, about 300 meters above sea level. It was possible to look down over the pine forest and see both coasts. The tinkling of goat bells was the only sound in the still, cool air.

Roidis laughed. “Now you have seen what no other tourist ever sees…the real Greece!”

Perhaps one day they would have to hire these village elders…to enhance a fading image. Like the Polynesian girls in the lavalavas greeting tourists as they deplane in Honolulu.

Later, back on the hotel terrace in Skala Fourkas, we drank Dutch beer and watched the sunbathers coming in from the pebble strewn beach. Turning to Roidis, we asked, “Where do your guests come from? What do they do here?”

“Germany, Britain mainly. By the plane load or tour bus. What do they do? Well, there they are, doing it. We haven’t any museums…a few ancient relics is all. The Ammon Dias Temple at Kallithea and the ruins at Potidea.”

“Old ?”

“Oh. Old! Fifth Century B.C. Quite a long history here. Ancient battles…the war between the gods and the giants for possession of Mt. Olympus. You know your Greek mythology?”

Some of it, yes. Cassandra certainly. The beautiful daughter of Priam, she was wooed by the sun god, Apollo himself. In return for accepting his advances, she was granted the gift of clairvoyance. When she began to have second thoughts about him and withheld her favors, he compromised his gift to her. From then on, no one believed her dire warnings of terrible things to come. Poor, pitiable Cassandra.

Unchanged since the 1950s, the Villa had been described as typical of that era when a family from Thessaloniki spent the month of August, the working father joining them on weekends. It is a place that gradually unfolds… the steeply sloped, pine-shaded parking down the rough, flagstone walkway, up to a taverna overlooking the sea, down, around thick-trunked old pines to a lower view over the water. A small, sandy cove is carved out of the limestone cliff, enclosed by huge boulders standing in the shallows like ancient sea gods, protecting the crescent of a beach. Beyond the stone gods, the open Aegean’s surface is choppy in the steady southern breeze. This was what tourism had wanted to be, but such places could no longer accommodate the numbers, and the tourists of the 80’s don’t even want it. Like a miniature Miami Beach, modern high-rise hotels ascend along Kassandra’s strand to meet modern tourism’s needs. The 600-room Athos Palace Hotel is a fair example. Built next to the site of the ancient Temple of Zeus which commemorates the victory over the giants, the eight-story hotel sought to commemorate the giants themselves. What would Cassandra have predicted?

Thessaloniki. If the Greek government lacks the means to protect its ancient artifacts, as we had been told, how could they be convinced to safeguard the natural environment, especially if the effort was seen as an obstruction to tourism? We went to the Ecology Laboratory of the University of Thessaloniki to find what we could learn from the environmental community. We called onProfessor Gerakis Pantazis, an ecologist and one of the principal advocates for the protection of the natural environment of northern Greece. We asked him some pointed questions about thestrength of new laws protecting Greek National Parks, and more specifically, how the government was dealing with the protection of the natural coastline, in light of the damage already suffered there by the rapid development of tourist facilities.

“The tourist business is important, no doubt,” he responded. “But agriculture is far more important to the national economy, and far more threatening to wildlife areas. The government does as it wants, and even the national parks are not safe if some agricultural need for the land is foreseen. But now we have some hope for protecting the natural environment by way of a new national law, but it is far too early to see any evidence of its effectiveness.” Pantazis handed us a synopsis of the enactment, which we quickly read. “Surely this will prevent both farming and tourism from wholesale destruction of protected wildlife area…including the breeding grounds of the endangered Dalmatian Pelican, for example?”

We spoke with Spyros Amougis, secretary general for tourism in Greece until 1982, about the rapid expansion of tourist facilities on Kassandra.

“Tourism is one-quarter of our foreign income, after agriculture exportation and shipping. We know that it is important to the nation’s economy, but we are also aware of the need to regulate hotel construction through sound planning practices.”

Amougis, an architect, went on to describe his own program for structuring growth in the beach communities and maintaining a fixed proportion of open space for natural balance. He drew a diagram illustrating the essentials of the concept, aimed largely at restricting parallel development along the coast, in order to prevent the eventual running together of tourist enclaves. From what we had seen, the plan was not succeeding too well.

The little coastal towns were charming and humanly scaled, their narrow, winding streets as picturesque as anything from the Middle Ages. They were being wiped away so casually in favor of the new uniformly dull tourist hotels, like those in Polyhrono, a fishing village on Kassandra’s east coast. The old organically winding streets had already been replaced by a gridiron street plan with matching parallel streets faced with brand new two-story pensions, each identical to the next. We had driven these monotonous streets searching for something different…a church, a school, a fisherman’s cottage. Anything. Apparently none of the old buildings had sufficient age or beauty…in the eyes of the government…to warrant protection. It is more difficult to convince a bureaucrat of qualities other than age, such as scale, balance, variety, charm, and open space. But if any of Kassandra’s not so ancient villages are to be preserved, they must be seen in terms of these values.

The students were also asked to rate ten possible tourist activities that could pertain to the beach communities of northern Greece. People are not always completely honest, however, about how they spend their time on vacation. It was of interest, nonetheless, to note that the sampling indicated a preference for archaeological sites, museums, and hiking over shopping, swimming, fishing, sunbathing (with discos and nightlife in general bringing up the rear).

Thankfully, the people of Kassandra are patient and forebearing, even in the face of the seasonal invasion of their beautiful peninsula. They listen stoically to the government’s explanation of how much better things will be as a result of this infusion of foreign money. But must they sacrifice their villages and beaches until the entire coastline resembles the domino beachfront of the Black Sea resorts? Or Miami Beach itself? Kassandra, like her mythical namesake, may already have revealed to us what is in store for all of Halkidiki.

NOTES:

1. Kallia-Antoniou, A., “Greek Framework Law on Environment at Last,” E.E.R., Vol. 1
   No. 2, February, 1987
2. Pearce, Douglas A., “Tourist Time Budgets,” Annals of Tourism Research, Vol. 15, No. 1, Pergamon Press, New York, 1988, pp. 109-111.
3. Pearce, Douglas A., “Tourist Time Budgets”.

REFERENCES:

Greece through the Ages, Greek National Tourist Organization, Athens, 1978.

Greece, Greek National Tourist Organization, 1981.

deJongh, Brian, Companion Guide to Mainland Greece, Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1983.

Harrison, John and Shirley, Greece, Rand-McNally, Chicago, 1981.

Provatakis, Theocharis, Mt Athos…History, Tradition, Touring, J. Rekos Co., Thessaloniki.

Pyrovetsi, Myrto, “Conservation vs Exploitation in a Developing Country.” Economics of Ecosystems Management, W. Junk Co., Dardrecht, Netherlands, 1985.