Greece writes fire rules into the ruins and puts tanks on the grass at Mystras

Visitors to Mystras this summer walked past the usual churches and palaces and also past olive-green water tanks, sprinkler towers and red hose boxes. The Byzantine town covers 84 acres on a hillside in the Peloponnese. The new hardware is there because fire, not time, is now the faster threat.

Greece issued regulations in June that tell archaeological sites how to keep water, cut vegetation and open emergency tracks. UNESCO has said few countries have written climate-driven fire rules that name monuments as such. The Culture Ministry says more than 60 sites already carry the new kit. The 2007 fires that ran close to ancient Olympia sit behind the paperwork. So do this summer’s dead: several people, including three firefighters and two men in a helicopter.

At Aigosthena, near Porto Germeno, a four-day fire that started on 31 July burned the hills around the fortress and left the walls and restored towers standing. Smoke stained church painting inside the acropolis. Fallen blocks stored for later restoration were damaged. Modern site buildings took a harder hit than the ancient stone. Officials credited years of brush cutting by the Ephorate of Antiquities of Western Attica.

The ministry is doing two jobs at once. It is putting water on hills that used to be left looking untouched. And it is finishing work that has nothing to do with fire. In June, Culture Minister Lina Mendoni had the last external scaffolding pulled from the Parthenon’s west face after the western pediment was rebuilt with two orthostates, one pieced from old fragments and new Pentelic marble, one carved fresh. She said the west front had not been seen whole for about 220 years.

Those two pictures belong together. A country that still argues for the return of the Parthenon sculptures also has to keep the stones that remain on the Acropolis and at Mystras from catching. Hydrants on a World Heritage slope look wrong until the slope burns. After Aigosthena, they look like the cheaper option.

Large fires that take more than 500 acres have become more common in Greece. The June code will not stop a crown fire in a gale. It can give a crew a tank and a track in the first hour, which is the hour that decides whether a church roof goes. Mystras now has both. The test is the next east wind, not the press visit.