On 23 July 2018, a wildfire swept from the hills above the Attic coast to the sea in roughly ninety minutes, overtaking towns northeast of Athens and killing more people than any other fire recorded in Greece. Katerina Angelopoulou was there with her mother and her three-year-old daughter; the three were trapped at the shoreline for hours before help arrived. Her book The Fumes of Mars, published by GOST Books, is not a straightforward record of that day. It is an attempt to account for the distance between what she lived through and what officialdom later said had happened.
Angelopoulou builds the book as an accumulation rather than a single line of argument. Black-and-white photographs of the aftermath stand beside survivors’ testimonies. Her own images, made while the disaster was still unfolding, are laid over a chronology of events. Then come the documents: aerial and topographical maps, weather and aircraft reports, CCTV and news imagery, lists of the dead with place and cause of death, material from the State Investigator’s report, and notes on the trial that followed. The closing pages turn to what she salvaged from the fire—remnants of jewellery, books, glasses—objects whose ordinariness carries the weight the surrounding paperwork cannot.
The stakes of this assembly are clear in the book’s own materials. In the aftermath, the public account of the fire repeatedly concealed facts and shifted blame onto residents and victims; the families’ truth was questioned. Against that, the volume holds forensic detail and first-person memory in the same frame, refusing to let either settle the other. Essays by the anthropologist Michael Herzfeld and by Yiannis Gabriel accompany the sequence, with Herzfeld writing on the press’s capacity to demand accountability where legal processes stalled.
For collectors attuned to documentary practice that treats evidence as a problem rather than a conclusion, this is a considered example: 232 pages, 101 images, hardback, published in 2025. Its subject—grief, institutional failure, and the manufacture of official doubt—is specific to Greece, but the book’s method, its insistence on juxtaposing the intimate and the administrative, gives it a reach well beyond the event.
