The Katowice disaster in the South-West of Poland has brought home the point about not building houses with flat roofs near or in mountain areas, where the winter weather is even colder than up here in North-West Poland. (Recently we hit a gorgeously cold -20C). Whatever the actual reason for the roof collapsing on the pigeon fanciers, the extreme cold was a factor. Possibly the supports for the flat roof cracked under the cold; less likely, but intriguing nevertheless, is that the weight of snow pulled the roof down, which would have only been possible if the organisers of the pigeon conference had not cleared the roof of snow. They swear blind that the snow had been removed, and wheel on witnesses who back up their story. Another cold place in the winter that begins with a 'K' is Kastoria. There is a major contrast in architecture between the plains and the mountainous, colder, wetter, areas of Greece. Greece is a land of flat- roofed cities in its plains or basins, which is where the majority of its cities are actually built. Go to Kastoria in the mountains, and in the winter you get sub-zero temperatures. It snows enough to drown the place. Here you see the point of sloping roofs, apart from the fact that they are aesthetically more pleasing.

Natural disasters and short-sighted building are nothing new. I was in Istanbul during its worst seismic period in recent years. There were two major earthquakes, both way over 7 on the Richter Scale, both of which wreaked havoc and destruction. Many lives would have been saved if the buildings had not been jerry-built, and the concrete used to build them had been reinforced, so that the building could bend with the earthquake rather than topple. Unfortunately, it is much more expensive to build this way, and greedy speculators rarely think of safety first. Also, the old adage that you build a house on rock and not on sand came into play, as the rocky areas were far less badly hit than the ex-swampy areas, something that the Greeks learned from when they had a major earthquake near Athens at much the same time.