With one week to go until the final deadline for making declarations regarding the clearance of vegetation from properties, and with the no-fires season (1st May to 31st October) well under way, the ministry for Climate Crisis and Civil Protection has been intensifying its efforts to ensure compliance, with ads appearing daily on the main TV stations.
Their drive has met with some success, with a much higher awareness of the issue than last year when the system was first introduced. According to a report on Ekathimerini, a total of 312 out of 334 municipalities are now signed up to the scheme, as against just 185 last year.
As of Thursday 5th June, almost 320,000 declarations had been submitted online by property owners to the website akatharista.apps.gov.gr. As is made clear to those submitting a declaration, the obligation extends beyond the 15th June deadline, with property owners expected to maintain their plots free of flammable materials throughout the no-fires season. Failure to submit a declaration can result in fine of €1,000, while false declarations can be deemed a criminal offence. The website also includes a section where citizens can make a complaint about plots belonging to other property owners, and in such cases, authorities may impose fines and carry out cleaning at the owner’s expense.
Again according to Ekathimerini: “Minister for Climate Crisis and Civil Protection Ioannis Kefalogiannis emphasised that the measures are not just bureaucratic but crucial to fire prevention. ‘Real-time cleaning can prevent the outbreak of a catastrophic fire,’ he said. Municipalities are required to conduct spot checks on at least 5% of declarations and inspections, and complaints are prioritised on the basis of risk, with areas near forests, hospitals, schools, and inaccessible zones receiving the highest attention.”
Enquiries among local landowners, who are admittedly mostly olive farmers with properties outside the urban limits, revealed a low level of awareness of the requirements, and a tendency to dismiss them as another imposition by a remote central government. However, clearance having finally been completed, we decided to proceed with our own declaration, the plot being in the centre of the village and very visible to the passer by.
Readers will remember that in a previous post (https://kolymbaricourier.com/2025/04/12/update-on-land-clearance/) we began the process of making a declaration but stopped short of submitting it as the clearance was not yet completed. Having now completed the process we can report as follows.
The final stages of the submission
Entering the coordinates of a plot which is not in the Land Registry produces a prompt to that effect, but the declaration can still proceed.
Following on from the narrative in the previous post, it turns out that here is no obstacle to submitting a declaration for a plot of land which is not yet on the Land Registry. One merely enters the coordinates from the topografiko, which produces a prompt saying: “The coordinates you have entered are for a plot which is not yet incorporated into the Hellenic Land Registry”. One can then continue by filling in the details of the land (nomos, municipality, settlement, etc), which should then throw up one’s personal details held by GSIS in the following screen. Hitting “next” then produces the final screen, where there is a set of boxes with statements to which one must reply “Yes” or “No/not required”, together with a space for further comments. These are as follows:
The declaration itself includes six questions which must be answered as Yes or No/Not required.
1) Cutting down and removal of dead and broken trees and branches and of branches in immediate contact with buildings: Yes No/Not required.
2) Removal of flammable plant materials lying on the ground, e.g. fallen leaves, dried weeds and dead branches: Yes No/Not required.
3) Pruning of the lower trunks of trees and adjusting the height of the pruning from the ground according to the age and type of tree: Yes No/Not required.
4) Thinning out of ground cover plants: Yes No/Not required.
5) Removal of all other abandoned caustic, combustible, explosive and inflammable materials, items of rubbish etc.: Yes No/Not required.
6) Safe collection and removal of all the products of clearance: Yes No/Not required.
A box for “General comments and observations” follows, then the declaration which says:
“I declare on my own responsibility that I have undertaken all the required works of clearance on my plot of land and that I will maintain it throughout the no-fires season, i.e. from 1st May to 31st October, in order to avoid the risk of causing fire and the rapid spread thereof.”
Once these are all filled the declaration can be submitted with the press of a button. The only complication is that, this being a rural area, where plots are not neatly rectangular, there may not be a single set of coordinates which describes the whole plot – our own plot has 39 pairs of coordinates. We circumvented this by entering the first pair of coordinates from the topografiko (which in this case represent an area of some 2 sq m at the entrance to the plot), and adding a statement in the general comments to the effect that they are standing proxy for the whole plot.