Greek Orthodox Easter in days of high Air Pollution

Dear readers,

I hope you all had a nice Orthodox Easter yesterday!

Greek Easter this year came at a moment when the atmospheric conditions were not really favorable to do either fireworks nor open air grills. Yesterday we had one of the worse days of the year in term of Air Pollution. See in the pictures how much smog there was in Athens. In average, Particulate Matter levels were 5 times higher than the WHO safety limits in Athens, and when the fireworks were fired they went up to 600 μg/m³, which is 60 times more than the safety levels.

The absence of wind, the high pressure and the heat kept all the smoke over Athens for the whole night and day.

The smell of the roasted lamb in our neighbourhoods was actually really nice, but that acrid, kind of sweet smog smell in the background (very high NO₂ in Athens these days), that never stops night/days since several days (actually do you smell it or is your nose so adjusted to it that you can’t really smell it?), is very annoying and worrying. If you wonder what it is in the weather of these days that makes your head “heavy”, even hurting, one answer is that it is very likely the combination of the high air pollution, sudden heat and air pressure. It’s not the high humidity as most of us think, because actually humidity is quite low these hot days. Air pollution is a cause of sufferance for us on many levels, but we simply don’t know because we were never trained to recognize it. It is a constant botherer that keeps on lurking on our wellbeing, without us even noticing.

I write this not to complain, but just to remind ourselves that it is about time that we all become aware of the Air we are breathing every day, and of the dangers of breathing polluted air, day after day, in our cities.

Imagine an Easter day in the future when there will be only electrical vehicles on our cities’ roads, and only electric sources of heating, with an electricity that is created only from renewable sources. Air Pollution will be so low, almost non existent, and the smell of roasting lamb will be so much nicer within a clean, crispy Air! You can be sure of that…

So, it is our very duty to get informed and start making the needed changes and pressing the authorities to finally make the transition into a cleaner energetic future. There is no alternative to that. Clean energy means clean Air. Clean Air means better health, and better health means more happiness. Don’t we all want that?