Drought Reveals a Sunken Village in Greece as a Reservoir Dries Up

In the late 1970s, the emptied Greek village of Kallio disappeared beneath the waters of an artificial lake. The Mornos dam, built 124 miles west of Athens, flooded the village to create a reservoir that would supplement the capital’s water supplies. Residents were forced to abandon their homes and move to other areas. But now, after a prolonged drought, the lake’s level has plummeted, and Kallio’s remains have emerged like a ghost from the past.

“You see the first floor that remains of my father-in-law’s two-story house … and next to it you can see what’s left of my cousins’ house,” Yorgos Iosifidis, a 60-year-old former resident of Kallio who had to resettle to higher ground when the village was flooded, tells the Agence France-Presse.

The drought comes on the heels of the country’s hottest June and July on record. And prior to that, Greece experienced its warmest winter on record this year. Amid this relentless march of heat and a lack of rain, the lake has been disappearing.

“Day by day, the water goes down,” Dimitris Giannopoulos, mayor of the surrounding Dorida municipality, tells Reuters’ Karolina Tagaris.

He adds that he hasn’t seen anything like this in more than three decades—that’s because this is the second time that Kallio has emerged. The first time was during another period of intense drought in the early 1990s.

But this time, “it’ll be more acute than even then if things don’t improve,” Kostas Koutsoumbas, the new community’s vice-mayor, tells the Guardian’s Helena Smith. He adds that the level of the lake has fallen about 131 feet this year.

More than four decades ago, Kallio’s residents were forced to leave behind their church, school and around 80 other buildings. Some chose to resettle just 1,200 feet above the original village, and looking downhill, they can now see “their childhood memories, their belongings and everything they left behind gradually emerging from the waters of the lake,” writes Greek Reporter’s Tasos Kokkinidis.

“We were very upset to leave, it was a great village,” Constantinos Gerodimos, a 90-year-old farmer and former resident of Kallio, tells Nicholas Paphitis of the Associated Press (AP). “We had lots of water, orchards with fruit trees, you name it.”

Now, the school and some residences are visible again, and a “bathtub ring” marks the previous waterline of the lake, per Gizmodo’s Isaac Schultz. Former residents are wondering if the church will eventually emerge, too—but if it does, it likely won’t be a happy sighting.

“It is an alarm bell,” Efthymis Lekkas, an expert in disaster management at the University of Athens, says to Reuters, of the dropping level of the lake. “We don’t know what will happen in the coming period. If we have a rainless winter, things will get difficult.”

In a statement last week, Greece’s Environment and Energy Ministry said the state water operator EYDAP would draw water from backup reservoirs and engage in water-saving measures in the coming years, including reducing leaks and recycling wastewater for industrial use.

However, Costas Koutsoubas, deputy mayor of the surrounding Doris municipality, tells the AP that if the drought continues, next year they’ll be facing a “dramatic situation.”

“We need it to pour in buckets, night and day, for five days,” he adds.

Margherita Bassi | READ MORE

Margherita Bassi is a freelance journalist and trilingual storyteller. Her work has appeared in publications including BBC Travel, Discover magazine, Live Science, Atlas Obscura and Hidden Compass.