Most visitors to a Greek island give no thought at all to what they would do if something went seriously wrong during their stay — a wildfire, an earthquake, a maritime incident. This is human nature, and in the overwhelming majority of cases nothing does go wrong. But Greece's General Secretariat for Civil Protection has decided that tourists deserve better than improvisation, and Aegina has been chosen as one of two pilot locations for a new system designed to fix the problem. THEMIS — the Tourism and Hazard Emergency Management Information System — is an EU-funded project that delivers localised emergency guidance for the island, written for people who do not know the place, do not speak the language, and need clear instructions quickly.
The choice of Aegina was not accidental. The island receives more than two hundred thousand visitors a year, concentrated heavily into the summer months, and its risk profile includes the hazards common to the whole Saronic region: wildfire in the dry season, earthquakes at any time, and the maritime incidents that come with being an island whose entire visitor economy arrives and leaves by boat. The other pilot site, Parga in Epirus, covers a different tourism context — the idea is to test the system in two contrasting destinations before rolling it out more widely across Greece and, eventually, as a model for the rest of Europe.
In practice, the useful part for a visitor is the project's civil protection portal at themis-cp.gr. Select the Municipality of Aegina and you get local evacuation guidance for the island, plus the option to download the emergency information as a PDF — worth doing, because in a real emergency the mobile network may be overloaded or unavailable, and an offline copy on your phone costs nothing. There is also a location tool that identifies your nearest guidance area, which matters on an island where the right course of action in Aegina town may differ from the right one in Agia Marina or Perdika. There is no separate app to install: the portal runs in any phone browser, and you can pin it to your home screen so it opens like an app - on an iPhone, open themis-cp.gr in Safari, tap the Share button and choose Add to Home Screen; on Android, open it in Chrome, tap the three-dot menu and choose Add to Home Screen. Do it once on the ferry over and the island’s emergency guidance is two taps away for the rest of your stay.
Two further things are worth knowing alongside THEMIS. First, the European emergency number 112 works throughout Greece from any phone, in English, and the Greek authorities use it to send location-based alert messages during wildfires and other emergencies — if your phone buzzes with a 112 alert during your stay, read it and take it seriously. Second, civil protection guidance in Greece is coordinated nationally at civilprotection.gov.gr. None of this is meant to alarm anyone; the odds remain overwhelmingly in favour of a completely uneventful holiday. But five minutes with the THEMIS portal on the ferry over is a sensible investment, in exactly the way that noting the fire exits in a hotel is sensible — trivial to do, and valuable in precisely the situation where you no longer have time to do it.