Could Oracle of Delphi Have Predicted This? : Plans for Greek-Soviet Aluminum Plant Called Threat to Temple of Apollo

Government plans to locate a giant, Soviet-built aluminum plant within sight and smell of the Temple of Apollo, site of the famous ancient oracle, have touched off an international protest and aroused fierce debate among residents of the spectacular area that inspired poets and artists since the time of Homer.

The $500-million plant, the first of several industrial projects that the Soviets are to sponsor under a 1983 agreement with Greece, is to be built at the small hilltop village of Aya Efthymia, 7 1/2 miles southeast of Delphi.

According to Mayor Elias Segounis of Delphi, wind patterns across the open valley of olive groves that spills into the Gulf of Corinth will carry corrosive smoke and steam from the plant directly onto the famed temple ruins at the place that ancient Greeks called the center of the Earth. The residue of bauxite sludge from the aluminum processing will seep into the ground water and pollute the sea, the mayor complained.

‘A Sublime Panorama’

A Swiss environmentalist, Franz Weber, said the pollution generated by the huge plant will spoil “a sublime panorama that is a major wonder of the world.”

In an appeal to Greece’s Socialist Prime Minister Andreas Papandreou, Weber complained that “this application in an ancient archeological zone disfigures the horizon of Delphi and it will pollute the town and the historical site. . . . It will change the birthplace of our civilization.”

Weber’s objections have sparked a letter-writing campaign by schoolchildren of other European countries, pleading with Papandreou to drop the plan.

The government, without responding to the environmental issues, has merely reasserted that the plan will go through.

Dates From 1400 BC

Delphi is one of the oldest and most heavily visited of the ancient sites of Greece. It dates from about 1400 BC, when, according to Homer, the god Apollo chose the site “to have a beautiful temple.” Its oracles--the usually enigmatic but prophetic utterances of Apollo delivered from the mouth of the temple’s Pythia (a prophesying priestess)--were legendary throughout antiquity and were credited with the rise and fall of heroes and kingdoms.

Oedipus, for example, was told in an oracle from the Pythia that he would slay his father and marry his mother, which he proceeded to do, beginning a chain of tragedies for himself and all his kin.

Croesus, who so admired the temple that he gave it a 550-pound solid gold statue of a lion, misunderstood his oracle’s advice that if he warred on the Persians he would destroy a great power. He fought them and destroyed his own kingdom, accurately bearing out the prophecy in the process.

The temple, with its enormous wealth of carvings and precious objects, thrived from earliest antiquity until its last recorded oracle was delivered to an emissary of the Emperor Julian in the 4th Century.

Final Oracle Apt

Critics of the Soviet aluminum plant say the final oracle is particularly apt today. Mumbled as always by a Pythia who sat on golden tripod behind a screen in a presumably drug-induced trance, the last oracle said:

Tell ye the King: the carven hall is fallen in decay;

Apollo hath no chapel left, no prophesying bay,

No talking spring. The stream is dry and had so much to say.

The talking spring was a sacred fountain that poured from two gigantic rock walls cleft by a long-ago earthquake to make a natural amphitheater for the Apollo temple and its scores of associated buildings. Now, according to some of the aluminum project’s harshest critics, the spring may become little more than a gully draining acid rain down the hillside.

The Greek Organization for the Protection of the Environment, one of the project’s opponents, has published figures estimating that the plant will burn 800 to 1,000 tons of oil each day to generate the steam and electricity required for aluminum processing. In addition to airborne pollution from the fuel oil, the group said, the plant will dump between 3,000 and 5,000 cubic meters of polluted red mud residue each day on a nearby field, from which water-borne pollutants would eventually leach into the adjacent Gulf of Corinth.

May Bring Acid Rain

The plant will further foul the air by evaporating about 10,000 cubic meters of water daily, which, according to Dr. Manolis Skoulos, a Greek environmental scientist who is president of the European Council on Environment, may subject the area to acid rain.

The ambitious Soviet-Greek industrial project calls for production of close to half a million tons of aluminum a year, earmarked in the first 10 years of operation for sale at controlled prices to the Soviet Union and Bulgaria. Some of the critics have charged that the Soviet Union, which will finance and construct the plant, has the better of the deal, for, by the time the plant produces aluminum, the pre-established price for the aluminum will be much lower than the market price.

But feelings about the proposed plant in the area of Delphi, while strong, are apparently mixed.

Opponents of the plant argue that, although there has been no poll or referendum to prove their point, a majority of the villagers in the area agree with Mayor Segounis, who said: “The whole thing is an electoral game of the Socialist government. They announced it to get votes from the left.”

Mayors Ask Technical Study

He said the mayors of all the area villages have asked the government to send specialists to Delphi and Aya Efthymia to do a thorough technical study of the effects of the plant’s pollutants, both on the environment and on the antiquities, which are extremely sensitive to airborne corrosives.

“The government hasn’t even studied the possibility of damage,” he said. “That’s why we supported Weber when he came up with scientific data showing that the factory would hurt the antiquities with thousands of tons of pollutants, ruining the marble.”

However, Segounis added, he and most other local opponents are not opposed to the idea of such a plant provided it is far away from them. They point out that the bauxite aluminum ore needed by the plant is concentrated in other areas, and they say the plant should be built nearer to a source of materials.

Jobs More Important to Some

But in Aya Efthymia, a number of residents said that, to them, the fears of Delphi for its tourist-drawing antiquities were second in importance. The first consideration, they said, is jobs for their young people, who now must leave home at the end of school to try to find work in Athens or some other larger city.

“We each have four or five kids and they’ve all left town because there’s nothing here for them to do,” said Spiros Babagenas, 67, who hopes that the plant will bring his grown children home.

“The jobs are the important thing,” said Spiros Manikas, 77, adding that officials have forecast a work force of 650 to 700 at the plant. “We just hope they don’t import the workers from someplace else,” he said.

But Yannis Golfinopoulos, the 35-year-old owner of a taverna in the port town of Itea, just below Delphi on the Gulf of Corinth, said there has already been so much delay in getting the project going that “the government probably won’t build it at all.” He pointed out that although construction by Soviet engineers was to have begun this year, nothing has been undertaken except a superficial land survey in a huge field outside Aya Efthymia.

Mayor Segounis said he believes the government is having second thoughts about the plant.

“I think they are stalling on purpose and will end up by relocating it someplace else,” he said. “I certainly hope so. Right now, our worst municipal problem is parking, and we don’t need any others.”