Draining Lake Copais: A Technical Appendix to Postblogging Technology, May 1955, I With Bonus LBA Collapse

 Edit: A bit quick with this one. 

Responding to a 29 November, 1952 article in The Economist putting forward  "rather pessimistic predictions" about the future of the Basin after the departure of English managers, writing in a letter published in the 30 April 1955 issue, P. X. Levandis, the Greek Agricultural Minister was pleased to refute those predictions by citing high  production per hectare. I missed this letter because I don't do the end-of-month issues of The Economist unless I've screwed up my withdrawal requests, which never happens, practically. Well, hardly ever. 

I did not miss, and mentioned in the postblogging, the response of the Liquidator of the Lake Copais Corporation, F, W. Willis. Willis refutes the claim of increased productivity of wheat and cotton by showing that Levandis is using misleading figures, specifically only those of the freeholding farmers. When land held by the company, or now the Greek government, and run as largescale farms are included, there is no trend line. Without going back three years to find out just how pessimistic The Economist was being, consider it not refuted. On the other hand, there's evidently a whole history here of the people who actually farmed the land, and something of an elephant in the room in terms of what was farmed. Wheat and cotton are cash crops, and in particular the great cash crops of third-quarter Nineteenth Century agricultural expansion that gave us bonanza farms in the Americas and Australia and more complicated booms in the Old World. (For example, the "salinisation crisis due to irrigation/irrigation failure due to rampaging Mongols" story about Iraqi agriculture derives from abandoning barley for wheat in this period.) 

Wheat and cotton are, as these things go, extensive crops, not traditionally the ones you grow on expensively reclaimed land. The Greeks eat rice and make linen, right? Given the emphasis on the landholders, one wonders exactly how much consultation there was with the locals who might have been using the Lake for traditional purposes like retting flax for weaving prior to the beginning of excavation and pumping. 

  Lake Copais is a wetland in central Boeotia.

The map at Wikipedia gives a better sense of the  location, so I stole it for you, because that is the kind of service I provide around here! Wiki goes on to note that the towns of Haliartus, Orchomenus, and Chaeronea were on its former shores, and notes that it was fed by three rivers and drained by underground sinks, the lake to all appearances being endorheic. It further appears (the statement is tagged as dubious on Wikipedia) that in the Nineteenth Century there was some concern that it was growing and threatening surrounding farmland. It seemed possible to drain the lake directly by a canal to the River Cephissus. 

This might or might not be how the French civil engineering firm of Montferirer and Bonnair came to receive a contract from the Greek government to drain the lake. This was initially successful, but a somewhat obscure sequence of events led to a loss of drainage  and the restoration of the lake to its full extent by 1887. The Lake Copais Company was contracted to replace the French, and, after a tortuously long delay, 241 square kilometers had been reclaimed by 1931. It was expropriated in 1953 per Wikipedia, or in 1952, effective 1953, per this old exchange of letters. (One could, of course, resolve the apparent contradiction by doing just a smidgeon of research, but that ain't gonna happen here!)  The former lake basin continues to be cultivated today.

Given all the grand civil engineering works of the late Nineteenth Century, successful and not, it seems hard to believe that a lake in Boeotia defeated the generation of engineers that built the Suez Canal and the Thames Embankment. But that's how reclamation goes. Since a lot of the interest in this is going to come back on its Bronze Age origins, I can hardly refrain from pointing to the extensive work done by the Middle Kingdom dynasts in the Fayyum Basin, a large oxbow lake on the Nile just south of the delta proper, work that subsequent governments have had to redo over the ages because reclamation is rarely forever, and something to think about as modern society's ability to maintain its infrastructure comes into question when faced with climate change and demographic collapse. (Oh, wait, I am informed that the last is not a problem, because Something Will Be Done, although the first is, because, apparently Something Won't Be Done.) 

In particular, it might have been a bit ambitious to attempt reclaiming an area with esoteric drainage due to all those sinkholes. Modern methods, which take forever-pumping for granted thanks to all the unlimited free energy we have now [eyeroll emoji], are another matter. But we might also ask what the locals thought about the transformation of a seasonal wetland into cash crop arable. Because the Wikipedia explanation that "the drainage canal level fell below the level" and organic material accumulating in the bottom of the lake and catching fire speaks to a failure to get out the labour needed to keep the area dredged and clear. This might be a matter of money, but also of passive resistance to the loss of pasturage, retting ponds, and other wetland resources. 

Technically speaking, the grand Nineteenth Century plan to drain Lake Copais seems to have been inspired by the idea that steam shovels could accomplish what had been attempted since the Bronze Age. This great time depth is secured in the most earthy way possible, by the presence of the Citadel of Gla in the midst of the reclamation, pictured above. Orchomenos is also a noted Bronze Age site, but Gla, surrounded by outworks and prominent to the eye, was the big one. Here's an even better map, stolen from a fun website:

https://brewminate.com/the-island-of-gla-an-ancient-mycenaean-mystery-solved/

Gla was actually a Middle Helladic (2000--1650BC) polder impoundment, but the Late Bronze Age work sought to drain the basin at its source by divertring the rivers feeding it into drainage canals with revetted embankments carrying roads across the marshy plain. Some of the canals were drained into natural limestone sinkholes, the others directly into the Gulf of Euboea. Strabo mentions a rock-cut drainage canal, although this seems vanishingly unlikely. 

Gla is particularly mysterious. The Ancients do not seem to have had a name for it (Gla is a more recent coinage), and it is by far the largest fortified place in the Mycenaean world, seven times the size of Mycenae, with the usual "cyclopean" walls and a modest six gates, allowing it to be besieged by only 85% as may epic heroes as nearby Thebes. Architecturally, Gla seems un-Mycenaean, with evidence of pitched, tiled roofs and a lack of a megaron in the one palatial structure found, with little evidence of other building within the walls. Our blogger, Duncan J. D. Smith, proposes that "Gla" is just temporarily translated Orchomenos, which explains why we don't have a name for it from Antiquity, and notes that geophysical survey may have found the missing buildings. 

Doesn't explain the architectural oddities. though. "Gla" appears to be an Albanian word. But of course we know that Late Bronze Age Greece was ethnically and linguistically homogenous. I would have thought it was also too small to pay for the reclamation of almost 300,000 hectares of arable. How much wheat did Mycenaean Greece even need? On the other hand, Foxglove points out that, cozy myths about making the rocky slopes bloom aside, historic expansions of wine and oil production have involved planting trees and vines on flat arable, because it is easier. And one of the arguments about Gla's name is that it in poesy it is the obvious candidate for Homer's "vine-rich Arne," the sticking point being that it doesn't look like vine country. Not the way that normal people plant vines, but . . . 

Anyway, it would be interesting to know  just how the Arvanite population used the site before the Nineteenth Century wheat rush.