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How the world sees Greece
Sunday, August 4, 2013
Greek ministers pledge crackdown on rioters after third night of chaos
Greece braces for more violence around funeral of teenage boy shot dead by police
Rick Riordan taps Greek myths for his popular ?Percy Jackson? series
Best-selling author Rick Riordan, who taught Greek mythology for many years in middle school in California and Texas, utilized ancient myths when writing the popular “Percy Jackson” series. He had been reading the sagas of the ancient Greek heroes as bedtime stories to his son, Haley, when he thought of the series. “When [...]
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100+ Days Of Captivity For Syrian Bishops
Metropolitan Mar Gregorios Yohanna Ibrahim and Metropolitan Boulous Yazigi have been captured for over 100 days now, despite the calls for their release by religious...
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Spending deprived Greece of primary surplus last year
Kathimerini | Spending deprived Greece of primary surplus last year Kathimerini Greece's economy shrank below 194 billion euros in market prices last year to a level last seen in 2005. This represents a drop of about 17 percent from the nominal GDP's peak at 233.2 billion in 2008. Economic output is expected to shrink further to ... |
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No Greek Cypriot leader ever wanted to reach an agreement in Cyprus
Turkish Cypriot president said Turkish Cypriots and guarantor state Turkey are running out of patience on Cyprus problem President of the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (TRNC) Dervis Eroglu on Saturday said that "no Greek Cypriot leader ever wanted to reach an agreement with the Turkish Cypriots in Cyprus".President Eroglu`s remarks came after a luncheon he attended at the Adiyaman ...
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No Bidders For Athens Mosque
Muslims in Greece who’ve long awaited an official mosque to be built in Athens at the expense of the government are going to have to wait longer because so far no Greek construction company wants the job. A fourth attempt to find a company to build the mosque in an old building will be made next month after three failed tenders have led to some firms claiming they withdrew because of fears ...
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A Glad Return To The Peloponnese
(Photo/Vasiliki Varvaki/Getty Images) The amphitheater of Epidauros, the Lourdes of classical Greece and a place of perfect acoustics where you can hear a leaf drop on the stage from the back row. We wouldn't have thought of going to Greece except that one of our daughter's best friends, Nefeli, was from there. "It's fine outside Athens," her parents assured us. ...
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Greece arrests German man on suspicion of spying for Turkey
The Guardian | Greece arrests German man on suspicion of spying for Turkey The Guardian Turkey said two of six people arrested were members of a Turkish militant group. . Turkey and Greece have a history of enmity and have come to the brink of war on several occasions, most recently in 1996 over an uninhabited Aegean islet. Daily Email ... |
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Protesters defy Greek government
1:57pm: Meantime, Athenians are leaving notes, flowers and candles at a makeshift shrine on the street corner in Exarchia where Alexandros Grigoropoulos was shot by police late on Saturday. A firebomb sits beside the pile of flowers and the area's graffiti is also reflecting anger at that killing. "Instigation is not accidental. The state is the murderer". 1:48pm: Alex from Athens is posting ...
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Op-Ed: Greek Finance Ministry denies plans to cut minimum wage
DigitalJournal.com | Op-Ed: Greek Finance Ministry denies plans to cut minimum wage DigitalJournal.com Greek media is reporting on a new hidden troika memorandum which would see the current minimum wage, already reduced by 22 per cent to €683 per month for over 25's, slashed to a new low of €495 per month ($657). Pensions could be cut by up to 30 ... Greek PM Antonis Samaras plays down EU/IMF fiscal gap estimates Greece Mulls Lifting Home Seizure Ban Samaras gears up for talks with Obama in Washington |
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Bonnie Stern: Recipes for a chic Greek dinner
National Post | Bonnie Stern: Recipes for a chic Greek dinner National Post If you can't get away this summer, you can take a trip at home by making simple, themed dinners. With this menu, eat outside and pretend you are on a Greek island. Even if you're dining on a small balcony, you will feel revived. It may also help to ... |
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Many benefit from Greece woman's can-do spirit
Many benefit from Greece woman's can-do spirit Rochester Democrat and Chronicle Charyll Monk, the Greece Chamber of Commerce's Citizen of the Year, assists veteran Richard Campbell of Henrietta in the Veterans Outreach Center's Stars & Stripes Flag Store on South Avenue, where she volunteers. / JEFF WITHEROW ... |
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Malta needs EU help to cope with its immigration crisis
Malta receives the highest number of asylum applications in the world in relation to its population. Only EU help can alleviate a growing sense of despair
Earlier this week, a rubber dinghy overloaded with refugees attempting to flee Africa for the safety of Europe ran into difficulty. As the boat – travelling from Libya to the EU's smallest state, Malta – began to sink, the Maltese army launched a 13-hour overnight operation to rescue the 112 passengers. Eight were airlifted to hospital for emergency treatment; the rest were suffering from exhaustion, dehydration and sunstroke.
This story is not unusual. Each week similar boats arrive on the country's shores. Last month, the prime minister, Joseph Muscat, attempted to send two planeloads of Somali migrants back to Africa, without hearing their pleas for asylum – echoing recent suggestions of a "tow-back" policy in Australia – before the European court of human rights (ECHR) issued an interim ruling that this would be illegal. (Muscat has since said that he was never going to follow through with the push back; it was merely a stunt intended to provoke the EU into action).
Whether or not it was a stunt, the move reflects a government in despair. Before Malta joined the EU in 2004, immigration levels were negligible. Because it is located close to north Africa, it has now become a gateway for migrants seeking entry to Europe. In relation to its population, it receives the highest number of asylum applications in the world. This is partly because it's so small – smaller than the Isle of Wight. The 17,000 undocumented migrants who have arrived in the last decade are equivalent to 2.7 million landing in Britain.
Having made the perilous journey, conditions for refugees when they arrive are poor. Malta operates a policy of mandatory detention of up to 18 months for undocumented migrants, housing them in crowded detention centres. Last week, it was fined €60,000 by the ECHR after the conditions that some migrants had been held in were ruled to constitute "inhuman or degrading treatment". These included cold temperatures, inadequate diet and lack of access to open air or exercise for up to three months at a time.
As elsewhere, immigration policy has become an obsession in recent weeks. Australia is facing controversy over its practice of diverting refugees to camps in Papua New Guinea, while the UK is embroiled in discussion about the ethics of a Home Office crackdown on illegal immigration. Visiting family in Malta last week, immigration was the topic of conversation everywhere I went; flicking through the national papers, page after page was dedicated to it.
And as elsewhere, there are factors at play here other than population pressures. The migrants, mainly from sub-Saharan Africa, are hard to miss in a nation that previously saw very few foreigners. Concerns about a "cultural invasion" have been expressed; anecdotes abound of rising crime in areas populated by migrants, though there is no evidence to support this; and racist assaults have begun to occur.
The residents of Malta must, and gradually will, adjust to a more multicultural society. But in the meantime, the country feels as though it is failing to cope with the situation. Whether this is a "crisis" or not is up for debate – many of the migrants ultimately move on from Malta, and research from Oxford University has suggested that the use of detention centres is a way of exaggerating the severity of the situation – but the government argues that it simply doesn't have the resources to deal with the boatloads of migrants arriving on its shores. It is renewing its call for the EU to implement a policy of mandatory burden sharing, whereby countries elsewhere in Europe would be obliged to absorb some of the migrants arriving in "frontier" countries like Malta. This solution has been supported in the past by Italy, Cyprus and Greece, also struggling with an influx of asylum applications, particularly after the Arab spring, but it has generally been met with resistance in Brussels.
What is clear is that the situation cannot continue as it is, with no integration, ethnic minorities segregated and exploited, and racist sentiments on the rise. Push backs, like the one attempted last month, are quite rightly illegal, but if the EU supports the protection of asylum seekers it must help frontier countries implement policies that will help achieve this. Countries like Malta, which has little experience of dealing with immigration, should not be left to their own devices. Proper systems must be put in place to assist migrants when they arrive, process applications faster and integrate or resettle them if they are granted asylum. The EU must offer resources and co-operation across member states to see that this happens.
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Greece Mulls Lifting Home Seizure Ban
Economic Times | Greece Mulls Lifting Home Seizure Ban Greek Reporter greek home11 Despite a lingering economic crisis, the coalition government led by Prime Minister and New Democracy Conservative leader Antonis Samaras wants to lift a ban on repossession of homes of people who can't afford to pay mortgages with their ... Samaras gears up for talks with Obama in Washington |
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How Miller Unearthed The Nemean Games
NEMEA, Greece - “The first year of excavation we started digging by hand. We didn’t know how deep we were going to have to go, but we ended up going almost seven metres in depth and it was very frustrating because we didn’t find anything for 12 weeks,” Classical Archaeologist Stephen Miller from University of California in Berkeley and Director of Nemea Excavations told New Europe on 25 July 2013, pointing at a photo from 1974.
We've been walking around Nemea for hours, looking at stuff, the Nemea Museum, the Temple of Zeus, baths, and ancient accommodations for visitors, and he's full of energy despite the heat. We briefly seek shelter in his air-conditioned office at the Society for the Revival of the Nemean Games to look at old excavation photos, including the one from when excavation begun.
“I was going to have to go back to Berkeley and show people this empty hole and say, ‘You gave me money last year, give me more money to dig another hole. But the very last day, we found a little stretch of the water channel down here and then we dug out into the ramp and found a little stretch of the starting blocks. And that last day was the 19th of July of 1974; the next day Cyprus was invaded. One night we were celebrating and the next day we thought war was coming,” Miller says, who spent a career unearthing ancient history.
“At any event, with that experience in hand and having found nothing in here, we could come in with the machine. The Caterpillar Tractor Company of Peoria, Illinois, helped us out with a machine and dug the overburden and then we dug the last metre or so by hand,” he says.
Miller excavated the stadium and then led to the revival of the ancient Nemean Games in 1996, 2000, 2004, 2008 and 2012.
The ancient Greeks celebrated festivals at Nemea that were part of the cycle of games at Delphi, Isthmia, and Olympia. At each one of these four locations in rotation, for a brief period each year, during a sacred truce all Greeks – Spartans and Athenians, Corinthians and Argives, Macedonians, and Cretans – gathered for games.
Moments later, I follow Miller through the tunnel to the ancient stadium, feeling the distant past like the ancient athletes heading from the quiet dark passage to the bright jab of light.
The Olympics, which are best known today, were the big games even in antiquity. “Theoretically, they were all the same. If you were an Athenian and you won either in Olympia or Delphi or Isthmia or Nemea, you got a free meal every day for the rest of your life. Pindar wrote odes for Olympic victors and Pythian victors and Isthmia victors and Nemea victors so there was equality there. But in one of his odes written for a victor the Isthmia Games, Pindar says, ‘And I hope he gets a victory at the Olympics, too,’” Miller says, referring to the ancient Greek lyric poet from Thebes. “So they were a little bit better. They were 200 years older. There was precedence that way,” he added.
The other thing about the ancient Olympics and the reason they were more popular in antiquity than the other games was that at Delphi and Isthmia and later on with the Nemean Games, they were musical competitions, Miller says. The victors were decided by a panel of judges, who could skew things their own way because the criteria were subjective. But at the Olympics they were just the athletics. “And you saw which javelin went the further, you couldn’t fix it. It was an element of impartiality and objectivity that made the Olympics always a bit better,” Miller says.
He noted that there is a growing interest in the revival of the Nemea Games. “People find out more about the Nemea Games. What we are doing now is providing a supplement to the Olympics. The Olympics are important, let’s not hide behind our fingers. The Olympics do something very important for our world. But they also have gaps. And one of the gaps is that, I won’t speak for you, but I could never participate in the Olympic Games because I’m not a good enough athlete. But I can come to the Nemean Games and take off my shoes and run like an ancient Greek down the track,” Miller says.
There is a physical contact on the day of the Nemean Games. “There is a sense of community, of family, of people getting together. It doesn’t matter if you speak the same language or not, you can sympathise ... Our problem is going to be, we’re very close to our limit of the size we can accommodate. This is all done with volunteer labour. If we had the resources we could probably do the Nemean Games every year. I think we would have the people to come for that, Miller says. “In 2012, we had over 240 volunteers doing various jobs. They just rolled up their sleeves and pitched in,” he added.
“We have two principles: One is authenticity; we try to be an ancient as we can. The other is participation; we don’t care if you enjoy watching, but we want you to enjoy participating, being a part of it. That means we have to provide the opportunity for as many as people as possible as quickly as possible to get their feet dirty with ancient dirt,” Miller says.
According to a myth, the death of the infant Opheltes was the cause of the foundation of the ancient Nemean Games. The baby had been set down on a bed of wild celery when a snake killed him. Hence the crown victory at Nemea was made of wild celery.
Miller noted that the Society for the Revival of the Nemean Games is also now in the process of trying to form a School of Ancient Athletics.
Miller noted that, regardless with the Nemean Games, there has developed a sort of indigenous tourism. “An Athenian family with their kids would come looking here, go to the stadium and then go to a winery. Last year for a period of time the site of the museum was closed on Saturdays and Sundays,” Miller says, grilling his teeth.
“I made a fuss, other people made a fuss. But the people who really made a fuss were the winemakers because they had people who were coming from Athens to see the site and then go to the winery and they would go to the winery and say, ‘Why is the site closed?’ They were very unhappy,” Miller says, adding that it was their muscle that opened the museum on weekends. “There was one Saturday nine buses came and people could not come in. I mean, take advantage of what you got guys,” Miller quipped.
This is especially important as Greece counts on revenues from tourism to pull out of a deep economic crisis. Miller says the economic crisis has affected tourism but not to the extent he expected. “I think the reason for that is that Nemea is new. Many people who have come to Greece in the past haven’t come to Nemea. And now they hear about Nemea and they come here. So our tourism levels are down but not as down as I would have anticipated. And, I have to say, that in the spring we had tremendous tourism. They were times when there were nine or 10 buses on any given day and some of them were Greek school kids but there were also a lot of non-Greeks who were here as well. More recently it has been a little quieter,” Miller says.
He says visitors come from all over the place. “We’re getting up to 50,000 to 60,000 visitors per year as Nemea gets more known,” he says.
He noted that Greece is recovering. “In this village most people are farmers and grow things that people eat and drink and yes the prices are lower but they are coming through. It’s not that they don’t have any jobs. It’s that they don’t pay as well as they had been. We’re not starving here,” Miller added.
Miller says he is optimistic Greece will pull through. “Greeks had been around for thousands of years. There’s have been ups and down. People like to complain. I grew up in a little town in Indiana, a little farming village, and people always complained. But the situation was never as bad as they thought,” he says.
Miller noted that Greece has changed tremendously since he arrived in Nemea in 1973. “It has been extraordinary to watch. When I first got here there were many houses that had no electricity. There was only house that had a car,” he says. “The cafenion had a television and that was it. Nobody else had a television. The second-third day I was here, the mayor came in and said, ‘I want you to be our guest tonight at the cafenion.’ The chairs were all lined up looking at the TV set and I was put on the front row. And then ‘Peyton Place’ came on. Here I was on the front row while everyone was watching ‘Peyton Place’ and all the women were outside looking through the window at this point. It has been a big change, an extraordinary change. I can’t believe the speed at which the changes have taken place – that’s economics,” Miller says.
“Money became easy in Greece. But with that came some excesses, too. Greece went from a cash economy to a credit card economy. And it never stopped off at the checkbook economy. Growing up in America and I think other countries as well, we had checks. We had to pay our bills with checks. And every month we had to sit down and balance the checkbook to make sure you had enough money to cover the checks that you were writing. That process disciplined you - made sure you did not spend more than you could. But when you moved from cash to credit cards, the credit cards say spend as much as you like, it’s all too easy,” Miller says.
Miller also conceived the quest to reconstruct the Temple of Zeus as part of his ongoing efforts to preserve the Ancient Nemea site. “At that time there were three columns, period. Since that time there have been a number of discoveries and the construction of this museum and instead of three columns there’re now nine columns for the temple,” he says. “I never planned to do this but in 1984 we begun to put up these two columns, we stopped for economic reasons, but we were able to start again in 1999 and we put these two columns up and then we continued around the corner – the whole corner of the building is displayed. I should also say that all the work that was done here was done by the University of California at Berkeley through the School of Classical Studies with the Ministry of Culture,” Miller says. “You’ll hear from my voice that we did not depend on government money either from the United States or from Greece or any place, it was mostly private money,” he added.
He said he considers Greece his home now and feels proud. “I have Greek citizenship, I pay taxes. I have been in Greece for so long,” he says.
Earlier in the day, I visited Ancient Corinth where I met Guy Sanders, Director of Corinth Excavations. A Brit, Sanders, has now continuously lived here for 25 years and, like Miller, considers Greece his home.
He told New Europe that excavation is going on continuously. “The Greek Archaeological Service is being digging down in the plain for the new railway to Patras and also the widening of the highway and they found incredible amounts Archaic, Classical, even Mycenaean tombs and a large part of the Mycenaean settlement and this is adding hugely key amount of culture stored around the village but it means the museum has to expand,” he says, adding that they added a new gallery in the museum and that these new findings could help to bring in new interest. “We are also doing restoration, reconstruction of a medieval monument,” he says. “Tourists would be able to understand what medieval life was like in Corinth.”
“If we bring in all the interested parties which is going to be tourism, local politics, national politics, the Greek Archaeological Service but also the excavators, we can work together to make this a kind of hub for archaeological tourism in the area and I can really see in 10-20 years’ time tourism and wanting to stay in hotels because there is so much to see,” Sanders says as we walk by Temple of Apollo.
“They come to Corinth and they say, ‘Wow we better go to Heraion, we better go to Nemea, we better go to Perachora, we better go to Isthmia and then they can go on to Nafplio for a gelato afterwards,” he says.
He added that a lot could be done for sustaining eco-tourism in the area. “A lot of people who come here are with University groups, mainly from America but I also do high school groups, students in Britain who are doing classics Latin-Greek or just in translation. But that only goes so far. Much more important is getting regular tourists here and hooking into something they enjoy seeing and having their imaginations fired up, some of them will come again,” Sanders says.
He strives to get the awareness out there. “And there are lots of really wonderful, didactic museums being set up under the auspices of Piraeus Bank like the Olive Oil Museum in Sparta, the [Open Air] Water-Power Museum in Dimitsana [Peloponnese], which are wonderful museums but under-visited at the moment because they’re not publicised enough. I think more needs to be done to push the cultural side of Greece over the lying-on- the-beach or getting-drunk-in-Matala side of Greece,” he says, referring to the trendy beach community in Crete.
Tourism at Corinth has dropped off over the years. “I remember seeing 20 tour buses at any one time at the parking lot here. I think we got to find a formula to start bringing these people back again,” Sanders says.
Asked if the economic crisis contributed to the fall, he says he doesn’t think the economic crisis did as much harm as the way media portrayed the protests that were going on in Athens.
“It was a huge image problem. Especially Americans were afraid to come to Greece because they though somehow they were going to be torched. This was purely negative advertising. They imagined it was going to be something like Cairo or Taksim Square in Constantinople. Now that things settled down a bit in terms of the demonstrations and the economy is seems to be fixing it is really noticeable tourists are coming back. You can see it in the number of buses. I can see it in the number of tours I give to university groups. People are coming back and it is slowly building up I hope for the better,” Sanders says.
At Ancient Isthmia, Jean Perras, Administrator of University of Chicago Excavations at Isthmia, told New Europe, walking past the Temple of Poseidon and the stadium that tourism has been slowing down because of the economic crisis. “But there at the archaeological sites in Greece there has always been a lot of interest,” she says. “We have schools coming and they do enactments.”
Local business owners also think that Greek tourism needs to reach its potential.
Dimitris Mitzithras, a hotel owner in Loutraki, told New Europe that Korinthos and Loutraki are not as well known to foreigners as they should be. “It is a major destination for Athenians but unfortunately it is not as well known abroad. It has huge geographical significance with Loutraki as a base that provides a beautiful long beach and for me you can combine it a visit all the archaeological sites of Greece within one day.
Marilena Stathopoulou, who owns a hotel in Kalamaki beach near Isthmia and three hotels in Athens, told New Europe she is fortunate that 80% of her hotels are full. Being family owned hotels, decisions are made easier. “I like to spend time with the clients,” she says, adding that many of the tourists are repeat visitors.
Back to Ancient Corinth, Sanders says that he is much more optimistic now about Greece making it out of the crisis than 5-10 years ago. “As painful as these things are, these kinds of issues that very much hold over us since the Byzantine Empire had to be addressed sooner or later, especially in the context of being a member of Europe. It’s been too long that we’ve been the victims of politics as usual up in Athens with tax avoidance and all the other issues we’ve been facing. Now that one hopes coming to grips with those issues perhaps we can look to Greece getting stronger economically rather than continuing to be weak,” Sanders says.
He also stressed the importance of religious tourism. “I’d say 50% of our tourists are basically here for the Apostle Paul. In recent years most of the interest has gone into St Paul in Corinth,” the Director of Corinth Excavations says.
Assistant Director Ioulia Tzonou-Herbst told New Europe that she is also optimistic. “Seeing that the tourism is picking up with the support of the Europeans should help Greece. If they really don’t believe we’re the bad Greeks and they’re keeping coming to Greece because of the sun and the monuments and everything, then it’s going to help the economy, it’s going to help everybody. They’re going to have a good time and we’re gonna get the revenue we need to boost our economy,” Tzonou-Herbst says.
There is also discussion about the new European package which is more directed towards the use of the space rather than the infrastructure of the spaces in the archaeological sited because money has been put here in Corinth from the European packages to restore monuments, she says. One of the major monuments has religious connotations and now there has been an effort to give the three-dimensionality of the monument and maybe explain more how the space was used in relationship to St Paul. “But I think the new package is more about creating programmes and interactive programmes and more materials to be used in the museum so the visitors understands the function of the spaces and the use of the objects in antiquity,” she says.
At Nemea, Miller says that people can all learn some things from the Ancient Greeks. “That’s why I’m here,” he says, adding: “It’s frustrating to see the same mistakes made in 5th century BC made today. If George W Bush had ever read Thucydides United States would never had invaded Iraq because he would have seen what happened to the Athenians when they invaded Syracuse”.
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Obama turns 52, celebrates out of sight at Camp David presidential retreat in Maryland
Happy Birthday, Mr. President: Obama turns 52
by DARLENE SUPERVILLE, Associated Press - 4 August 2013 09:13-04:00
WASHINGTON (AP) — Happy Birthday, Mr. President.
Barack Obama turns 52 on Sunday and is spending part of the day at the Camp David presidential retreat in Maryland.
The White House said little about how he's celebrating. He played golf Saturday with friends from his days in Hawaii and Chicago. Some of them joined him at Camp David.
Obama is scheduled to return to the White House on Sunday afternoon. His week ahead includes travel to the West Coast to discuss plans to help homeowners, appear on "The Tonight Show" with Jay Leno and visit with troops at Camp Pendleton.
He also has a White House meeting Thursday with the prime minister of Greece.
News Topics: General news
People, Places and Companies: Barack Obama, Jay Leno
Copyright 2013 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
This article is published under the terms of the News Licensing Group, LLC.
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Mitsotakis Has Toughest Job in Greece
(Photo/Reuters) Greece's new Administrative Reform Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis, son of a former prime minister, is under the gun as he moves to fire thousands of public workers. ATHENS (Reuters) -- As political jobs go, Greece's new reforms minister has one of the toughest: firing thousands of workers within months from a public sector that seems immune to change. But Kyriakos ...
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German Man Charged As Chios Spy
(AP Photo/Greek Coast Guard) Coast Guard officers on Chios guard a boat after the arrest of six men suspected of ferrying explosives and weapons. Counter-terrorism police detained 12 people during raids in Greece following the arrest across the Aegean Sea to Turkey. Just days after police charged six men - three Greeks and three Turks - were terrorism after their arms-laden speedboat was seized ...
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Samaras Readies U.S. Visit Meeting Obama
ATHENS - Hoping for an August break from social unrest over the coming firing of thousands of public workers, Greek Prime Minister Antonis Samaras is heading to the U.S. for a three-day visit including an Aug. 8 meeting scheduled with President Barack Obama. Samaras is expecting support for imposing more austerity measures on the orders of international lenders that are backed by the U.S. which ...
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George Mitchell obituary
Engineer who developed fracking, the revolutionary and controversial technique for extracting oil and gas
George Mitchell, who has died aged 94, was one of the elite corps of engineers whose ideas, ingenuity and persistence changed the world. He was the father of "fracking" – hydraulic fracturing, the process by which dense shale rocks deep underground are blasted apart to release the gas and oil trapped within – and his innovations, developed over several decades, started an engineering revolution that is transforming the US from a guzzler of imported fuel to an energy-independent nation. Mitchell's influence, and his innovations in getting hard-to-reach fossil fuels out of the ground, have arguably had more effect on US foreign policy than any statesman since the start of the cold war.
The extent of the revolution he brought about is hard to overstate. In the 1990s, the US was so dependent on oil from Saudi Arabia that the future of relations between the world's most powerful nation and the Middle East seemed set. Mitchell opened up a new and previously unthought-of resource – shale gas. Thanks to the hydraulic fracturing techniques that he pioneered, for the first time since the second world war the US could be free of the need to import fuels. The International Energy Agency has predicted that within five years America could be the biggest oil producer in the world.
Born in Galveston, Texas, Mitchell was the son of poor Greek immigrants. His charitable foundation, which has given more than $400m to various causes, programmes and institutions, called his story "quintessentially American". With virtually nothing to his name, he graduated first in his class from Texas A&M University, then joined the "Greatest Generation" of American men fighting in the second world war, as an engineer. Afterwards, he and his wife, Cynthia – whom he married in 1943 – settled in Texas, where he saw at first-hand the bonanza of the early discoveries of oil.
Mitchell became what we could call an entrepreneur and what at the time was termed a "wildcatter". He bought, at great financial risk, areas of Texas that were unregarded by the oil majors. From these he made his first fortune. But it was not until Mitchell brought his engineering expertise to bear on a hitherto neglected problem that he achieved the breakthrough that made his name.
Fracking as a technique was nothing new: the theory had been explored and even demonstrated, if little practised, since the 1940s. The process involved – and still does – blasting water, sand and chemicals at high pressure against dense shale rocks, creating tiny fissures that release the microscopic bubbles of gas trapped within. But the technique was difficult to use in practice, and any gas produced was hard to capture, because of its tendency to leak away rather than be funnelled to the surface in pipes. The work required to drill a single well was not repaid by the fuel yielded.
Mitchell's genius was to bring to bear advances in technology that allowed the massive drilling equipment used to carve out vertical wells to be turned around, underground, to drill horizontal tunnels. The result was revolutionary. Whereas vertical wells were necessarily limited in the amount of gas they could bring to the surface, once it was possible to have horizontal wells branching in all directions – imagine a Christmas tree – the yields increased exponentially. Rock formations could be fracked and fracked again over huge areas underground, with only a small "footprint" revealing its presence at the surface.
In the late 1990s, after nearly two decades of painstaking experimentation, Mitchell's pioneering techniques began to bear fruit. He expanded his fracking operations rapidly and soon attracted the attention of the oil and gas "majors". In 2002, he sold his company to Devon Energy Corporation for $3.5bn.
It was long after Mitchell started using horizontal fracking that the problems began to emerge. The first wells were in unpopulated regions, but as the technique was more widely used, people living near fracking sites found their air and water contaminated, and thanks to a clause inserted into US law in 2005 by the then vice-president, Dick Cheney, who has extensive fossil fuel interests, they were unable to find out which chemicals were being pumped into the land below them. Fracking became a focus for protest.
Mitchell had drilled more than 10,000 wells before selling to Devon. Today there are more than half a million in the US – the flaring of excess gas can be seen from space at night, lighting up the continent like Oxford Street at Christmas.
When Mitchell started his work, the theory of climate change was a quaint backwater of academic research. Within his lifetime, our unquenchable thirst for hydrocarbons has led to fears of a climate catastrophe, as the vast volumes of carbon spewed into the atmosphere are already having effects. Scientists warn we must leave much of the world's fossil fuel resources in the ground if we are to prevent runaway global warming. But as Mitchell found, leaving stuff in the ground does not come naturally to us. The most profitable direction of innovation has always been to squeeze more out of our mineral wealth.
Mitchell himself was a lover of nature, and an ardent philanthropist. His Woodlands estate in Texas was intended as a model village, and he poured a large part of his fortune into conservation, including attempts to save the Texas woodpecker.
Cynthia died in 2009. Mitchell is survived by their 10 children.
• George Phydias Mitchell, engineer and businessman, born 21 May 1919; died 26 July 2013
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