Archive · Journalism & Reportage

Armenia

1988 · The Spitak and Leninakan earthquake, and his first report from abroad.

In December 1988 Armenia was still one of the Soviet republics. The earthquake at Spitak and Leninakan, on 7 December, was among the twentieth century's deadliest; the dead, by estimates, reached 50,000.

Argyris Dinopoulos went as a reporter for ERT, accompanying the Greek relief mission, which reached the area by military C-130 through the airport at Tbilisi. The mission was made up of men from EMAK — the Special Disaster Response Unit, formed only a year earlier, in 1987, and operating outside Greece for the first time.

From Leninakan, transmitting television pictures was impossible — not even over land lines. He filed the rescue operations by telephone, from the city's barely functioning telecommunications centre. The footage was broadcast by ERT once the mission returned, and, because of the response it drew, he presented it himself at events organised by the Armenian community in Greece.

Shortly before boarding the C-130 at Elefsina, the cameraman Giorgos Stavridis made a last check on his camera — a Beta Cam, the type then just replacing the U-matics — and found it dead. Another was rushed out from ERT and the departure was held for almost an hour. It is to Stavridis's experience and foresight, as he puts it himself, that his first report from abroad owes its existence.