The greatest menace to the public health of Athenians is that ominous and obvious phenomenon hovering over us all, the nefos. If, during 1988, the nefos can be wholly or in part got rid of, it would be a great year even in the annals of a city whose earliest inhabitant on record, five millennia ago, is known to have suffered from arthritis and serious tooth decay but showed no evidence of respiratory complaints.
Last month the nefos descended on Athens for the nth time, sending hundreds of emergency cases to hospital. Millions survived, but living as they do under threatening conditions year after year, it will have increasingly serious repercussions on the national heatlh.
On December 15, the government announced a series of dramatic measures to combat pollution in Athens which, in the holiday spirit, it called ‘a package’. It might better have been referred to as a Pandora’s box. Among its contents was the closing of the Stadiou-Athinas-Ermou triangle to private traffic from the month of February; a continuation of daily traffic restrictions now in force from 4 p.m. to 8 p.m.; the banning of diesel fuel; the monitoring of parking violations; the expulsion of the most polluting industries from the city in six months’ time; the mandatory installation of exhaust filters; the introduction of biannual inspections of private vehicles; construction of the Athens Metro, and the building of ample public garage facilities outside the center of the city.
The deputy prime minister Mr Koutsoyiorgas referred to this package as ‘historic’. He was right. It was even historical. If these measures sounded like items pulled out of ‘grandmother’s trunk’, it’s because grandmother was still in the prime of life when most of them were first proposed.
In equally historic fashion, all the opposition parties at once leapt on this package and tore it to bits. They found it inadequate, inconsistent, incoherent (a favorite new word) and self-serving. One was dismayed to hear from New Democracy that most of the measures were not based on proper ‘studies’ and could never be implemented. From the most cursory survey of local affairs during the last 15 years no one might have imagined that enough studies had been made on the effects of the nefos to paper all the hoardings in Athens of which there are myriads, mostly devoted to the pleasures of smoking.
It is gratifying to report, however, that continuous working hours for shops received positive endorsement from all parties. But it was nothing new. The maiden issue of this magazine, published in April 1974, recorded not only the first implementation of continuous shopping hours but the howls of protest that attended it and the chaos that it caused. Pursuing this historic approach further, archives reveal that the Athens Metro ‘surfaced’ for the first time two months later. The realization that drillings were already being made all over Athens for the underground in the last days of the junta is food, however indigestible, for thought today.
Oddly enough, the word nefos only appeared two years later, though like most historical subjects, the real thing had been around for some time before arousing public attention. The overpopulation of the Athens valley had occurred long before its effects were written in the sky. Probably it was when the ingenious Swiss who, prompted by archaeologists’ concern for the deterioration of ancient marbles, proposed erecting a plastic dome over the whole Acropolis in 1977, that Athenians were spurred into wondering about their own health. Later there were demonstrations. In the late 70s a protest was held in Kotzias Square in front of Town Hall with some people wearing gas masks. In 1980 the first, if ineffective, traffic control measures were introduced. The following year, PASOK ran on a platform promising to solve the pollution problem in 100 days. Since then over 2,000 days have passed and here we are under the nefos, and under the weather, in 1988.
So much for the past. As for the future, when many countries are bracing themselves for the 21st century, there is no reason for Athens to fall back into the 19th-century peasoup fogs of Dickens’ London. It must take its future into its own capable hands. The government’s ‘historic’ quick-as-a-rabbit package cure should be honored in so far as they honor it. If, in six months’ time, progress has been made, well and good. If not, there is always the ‘Bastille’ solution.
Should, one fine afternoon, 80,000 Athenians not congregate at a football game in the Olympic Stadium to shout, but continue on to Syntagma and shout there with all the fury for which they are famous, then perhaps wonderful things could happen. It isn’t necessary to gather in Syntagma just to ‘hail the chief and wave plastic flags and mouth slogans. Sometimes it is necessary to gather there to get necessary things done. That’s how Greeks got their first constitution. That’s why the square is called Syntagma. And that’s why it may still be the best place to start getting rid of the nefos.
