Elderly Greek made homeless by fire questions God

By Michele Kambas

MATESI, Greece (Reuters) - Homeless at 86, Panagiotis Kokkaliaris ponders whether the fires which ravaged Greece in recent days were an act of God.

"My home burnt, my animal pen went up, my olives were lost. I have nothing. What is there to believe any more?" said Kokkaliaris.

"My life was there," he said, pointing to a burned-out shell of a house in Matesi, a remote mountain village of the Peloponnese, lying some 350 km south-west of Athens. "Everything has turned to dust."

Kokkaliaris was one of thousands of Greeks who fled towering walls of fire which have scorched a trail of devastation through the Peloponnese peninsula in the past week. Matesi was one of the hardest hit communities by fires that killed 63 people.

"It was like somebody launched a rocket which just went flying though the woods," said Kokkaliaris as he sat in a makeshift camp on Wednesday set up by Greek authorities to chart the scale of loss.

He abandoned his home when flames approached on Monday. He returned on Tuesday, only to find it gutted. Now, he says, has nothing to his name.

"My life was in that house," he said, his voice on the verge of breaking. "I was born in 1922, I don't know anything else or anywhere else."

A wiry bespectacled man with a shock of black hair laced with white despite his advanced age, Kokkaliaris left his home with the clothes on his back and has been staying with relatives since the blaze. All identification papers were destroyed.