5. Environmental Education centre

In 1947 the ongoing Greek Civil War had caused calamitous losses in rural areas, where the army was unable to control the movement of communist guerrilla fighters. Half a million people had already abandoned their homes in the mountains to become residents of temporary refugee camps in large urban areas. Almost half of these people were children. This mass movement was officially attributed to the fear of the communists, but many people were forcefully relocated by the authorities to deprive the rebels of local support networks. The needs of these people were great, so in the summer of 1947 Queen Frederica organized a national fundraiser to create a network of child cities.

The facilities accommodated orphans and abandoned children from unsafe areas, as well as children whose parents were soldiers or political prisoners of the Greek government. The 51 cities provided a safe environment for 18,000 children aged 4-16 years old. Most of them were too young to understand what was happening in Greece but, despite the obvious political and ideological orientation of the cities’ creators, it seems that care was provided to all irrespective of their parents’ position in the civil war. Frederica was declared as the “first mother of Greece” or “Great Mother”, and many parents were proud to say that they had “given their children to the queen”.

The first group of children arrived in Zirou Lake in early 1948 and in great haste due to the urgent evacuation of an orphanage in an area where military operations were under way. The children had lice and most of them were barefoot. The authorities sprayed them with DDT to kill the lice and cut their hair real short. They gave them clean underwear and new clothes and shoes, before treating them once more with DDT and petroleum. When all this cleaning and scrubbing was done, the children went to the restaurant, where the adults noticed that one of them seemed unsure as to what to do with his food. It turns out the child had never used a plate before and was unaccustomed to having a whole serving to himself.

The child city of Zirou Lake was designed and built by the Swiss Red Cross. There was a fence around the lake to prevent children from drowning but the city itself was not a ghetto. There was plenty of quality food and clean clothes; the facilities included a pigsty and a cabbage garden, washing and mending facilities, a theater, a church, and a stadium. There were 12 groups of 44 children each, with a woman in charge. These “mothers” were unmarried girls who left when they found a husband. The children woke up at 6am and went to school, while in the afternoon they learned various trades. The child city was slowly abandoned as the children grew up, with the last of them leaving in 1989.