Former Greek prime minister Alexis Tsipras’ memoirs, the book “Ithaca”, has generated a firestorm of controversy and attracted widespread media attention this week in the country, as the one-time leftist firebrand details events, personalities and situations from his standpoint – becoming an instant best-seller (more than 30K copies) in the local market and with another print run already scheduled.
Although the voluminous 750-page tome is comprehensive in its treatment of events, persons and policies – from Tsipras’ standpoint – that shaped his political ascent and downfall, one major-cum tragic milestone of his tenure as prime minister (2015-19) received less, but more emotional attention: the July 23, 2018 Mati wildfire that claimed the lives of 104 people and injured hundreds of others in a seaside resort east of Athens proper.
Nevertheless, in the book Tsipras doesn’t describe the event itself so much as the way he experienced that fateful day, beginning from the breeze blowing that morning in the Cape Sounion area where he resided to the moment he returns to Athens from a shortened official trip to Sarajevo in order to take part in a now notorious operational meeting with relevant ministers and local government officials. The latter was held only hours after the wildfire had literally scorched the entire the Mati settlement and stopped at the cliff side.
In his memoir, the former Greek prime minister insists that at the grim meeting, as television cameras were broadcasting live, “which added to the awkwardness”, none of the participants seemed to have a “complete and clear picture.”
Alexis Tsipras’ newly released book “Ithaca”.
Tsipras relates that the first mention of deaths, “they asked for body bags a little while ago”, is made after reporters had left the room.
He claimed that information, from early on, was “fragmentary, ominous without a clear picture of the disaster and without the coherence and certainty to ascertain whether the (state’s) coordination is working.”
‘The ultimate responsibility was mine’
“Mati was the darkest, the most painful and traumatic ordeal of my prime ministerial tenure. A personal collapse. The annihilation of unsuspecting people by a relentless force that we should have, but could not control,” he said, describing how it was the first instance in his life that he invoked God to express his despair.
The shambolic response by state and local governments to the devastating and abrupt wildfire, which was fanned by gale force winds, literally eviscerated his coalition government’s remaining popularity at the time, with center-right New Democracy (ND) party and its leader Kyriakos Mitsotakis winning a landslide election in July 2019.
