The huge plane trees, with the thick trunks and the very dense foliage, in the courtyard of the historic miners’ club, on the Stratoni beach Halkidiki, They complete over fifty years of life. The building itself is older than 1960s, built with the trend of architecture which prevailed in the decades of the second half of the 20th century, to ensure greater functionality and comfort for the purpose it served: the short break of the wagons, electricians and machinery operators, before and after the hard work of the “mines” in the “mines”.
There, in the club, to this day, generations and generations of minerals of the mall are spending their hours with coffee, Tsipouro and appetizers, along with their active colleagues -their children and grandchildren, who continued in the same profession. Three and four generations of miners are measured by most today’s Stratoni families. The village, after all, is closely linked to metallurgy, which has been the main activity of the area since ancient times.
The oldest of the permanent residents had not even been born – even their grandparents – on the days when the “French – Ottoman Company of Kassandra” created the first “watermill installation” in 1907. Not even when, after the great war, Kanellopoulos.
Were young children in 1952, When the Hellenic Hellenic Company The first of the three ore enrichment plants in the area. The plant was “sprinkling” sulfur ores to produce the Sfallerite and Galeite condenses. “This factory is your … cow, your field, take care of it and you will live by it,” he used to tell the old workers in the 1960s, the then -major shareholder of AEEX & L. Prodromos Bodosakis Athanasiadis, owner of the Kassandra Minerals Company.
In the “Pigadaki” in the club, some of the older ones, now the work, say that they had sometimes met Prodromos Bodosakis Athanasiadis, “strict, imposing”, to wander around the company’s construction site. to Stratoni of Halkidiki. His nephew, who succeeded him in the management of the company, Alekos Athanasiadis, was better known. “He was friendly, accessible to workers, he came here with his family to Villa Bodosakis. They loved horses and often riding, “Costas, one of the oldest workers, who arrived in Stratoni for work in the early 1970s, tells RES-EIA.
In that decade, the enrichment plant at the Olympiad began to operate, where it began to gradually shift and interest, mainly in gold metallurgy. Just three years ago the mining stopped at “Madem Lakko”, But Stratoni remained the main place of loading the ores and departure by ships and containers.
At the same time, in the 1970s a greater electricity of machinery was gradually beginning. Until then the machines were mainly manual and the processing of the ore slower. “From one and a half – two tonnes per hour, we have reached fifty -sixty tonnes,” says Pantelis, the youngest worker, who lived the transition from the old to the newest metallurgy methodology.
Lead, Tsigos and the Iron Affairs They were the main ores at that time. But it wasn’t just these. One minerals characteristically states that “there have always been precious metals in the load -and gold and silver” and the company was coating and costing them in the condensate, which was loading and leaving the boats from the port of Straton.
The company then employed permanent workers and miners and electricians and engineers who worked in small groups. Their remuneration was also determined by the volume of ore production. The carnivores carried the ore from the “Madem Lakko”, for processing to the factory and from there to loading. With the addition of the rolling tape, the loading time was drastically reduced. At the same time, as the production went up, workers’ earnings increased.
“Most most Mining workers at that time were getting salaries and maybe doublefrom the rest of the private sector workers and that is why we have rarely had strikes, “says a mine. He remembers, however, the 1977 great strike for “additional remuneration” and labor rights, which involved many employees.
Most of the old ones remember the most critical moments of the mining crisis, around the mid -1980s, and the gradual withering of AEEXP & L, which passed into the control of state meta. Finally, in 1992, it was put into liquidation. During the three years, until the new ownership regime was cleared, the units were underfunded and a veil of uncertainty covered the galleries and miners.
The “spring” of salaries, however, came with the arrival of TVX Hellas, a subsidiary of Canadian company TVX Gold, which acquired the majority of Kassandra Mines’ shares in late 1995, with the main objective, as it had announced, the extension of the activity of Chrysu. “The wages, from two hundred and three hundred thousand drachmas, reached the seven hundred, almost tripled suddenly. We were seeing a lot of money, but nothing in investment, equipment and that was worried, “says the club.
Unfortunately, their feeling proved to be true. In 2003, TVX Gold was announced. The causes of the “padlock” were then attributed to the reactions of those who did not want gold metallurgy, long -term litigation, appeals to courts and institutional obstacles to the company from expanding its activities to “black stones”. But, today, fewer miners believe this. Most have now been convinced that the company, as they argue, “did not actually have the intention of doing more productive work”, but rather to benefit from the price fluctuations on the metal stock market.
The older ones remember TVX Hellas’ bankruptcy as the most traumatic event of their lives. Brought them to complete professional exclusion and in despair and about five hundred families They lost every medium of livelihood, to the point where the Greek state was forced to do a special program For the unemployed until a solution is found. It was finally found three years later, when in 2004 “Hellenic Gold” bought the rights to exploit and the Canadian Eldorado Gold undertook to restart mining in the two areas of Straton and Olympiad and at the “Skouries” site.
But now, technology had changed and political and social conditions required a metallurgy of another quality, more compatible with the environment and more worker than the worker than the conditions of mining. The logic of mining and its techniques had progressed significantly. Until the 1980s, miners remember, as they say, the large pipeline that rejected the sewage of the sea treatment and there were few who were ignorant of what would happen in the coming decades with pollution in the area.
“Everything, at sea and in the rivers, ended up, and that’s why mining companies chose seats near the sea and water for their washing machines,” one of the friends argues, and continues: “In the 1980s, this practice was banned. Today, the sea has been largely cleaned, but in some places on the beach, which were embedded in sand, there remains to be made for complete deterioration. This period is also launched with the support of the Mining Company, for the beach of Stratoni, an important regeneration project, in which deposits will be dug and removed at eighty centimeters deep, so that it will not be reminiscent of the old age of pollution. “
“Then, a child, I bathing in the sea, Here I learned swimming, but it didn’t really bother us too, we didn’t know much … “, adds an old mine.
Even the mode of production in the mines changed, modernized, higher levels of security were set. Until the 1980s, the piercing in the galleries, in order to place the explosives, was made almost by contact. The dust that lifted the buns filled the galleries. The “hawks” were the result of this activity, as they then said those who suffered from pneumonia. It was the most common professional disease in mines and unfortunately incurable. Employees from the age of thirty -five and forty, who worked without protection, were forced to stop their professional activity for health reasons. The youngest of her company says, however, that this has changed and there are no such illness for many years.
“Today, Explosives are placed after the water pressure slots are opened, From a distance, with “jambo”, from six and seven meters away; nothing to do with the past, everything is calculated and the use of the protection media is strictly strict, “he notes.
The old residents of Stratoni, however, had no choice then. Personal protection “there were and did not exist”, as they say. Environmental and health information was informed. Most of them lived in the houses that the company had built for employees. Even today, the three-quarters of the village consist of houses belonging to the company, explain, speaking to RES-EIA, old miners.
“The houses were free, they didn’t ask for a rent from the company. Employees lived free of charge as their employment lasted – which of course it usually lasted forever, because there was almost always a job here with metallurgy. When an employee was leaving, he was emptying the house and one another and his family entered. And so it went from generation to generation. “
The one that was in line with The productive activity was also the technical education that existed in Stratoni, at times when it had even two and a half thousand permanent residents. The renowned OAED School in Stratoni, four years of study, was producing “fingerprints all over Greece” technicians, miners, electricians, engineers, drivers, machine operators. As the group of the club says: “Wherever you went with this degree, you were working. Such a prestige was the school, who was hired and only to say that you had this paper. Today the school does not work, unfortunately, and so it is difficult to find specialized metallurgy. Many today’s workers need to come elsewhere. “
The society of the region, despite its tourist rise, remains associated with metallurgy, which has never ceased to exist since antiquity. That is why the thoughts of today’s municipal authority are focused on exploiting this relationship. Hence the recent Aristotle Municipality’s initiative to sign a Memorandum of Understanding with seven other municipalities for the creation of a mining history network.
Stratoni is a live metallurgy story, that is going through time and seems willing to correct weaknesses and errors of its past, to comply with rules and to apply modern production practices, more environmentally friendly. Already, Thassos, Milos, Philip, the Delphi, who signed the Memorandum, consider metallurgy as part of their history, which is combined with their culture and tourism, without social tensions and economic and environmental impasses for their areas.