A developer and architect on the Greek island of Patmos have attempted to build on protected land four separate times, i...

A developer and architect on the Greek island of Patmos have attempted to build on protected land four separate times, ignoring three separate court rulings that cancelled their permits, including a unanimous final decision by Greece's highest administrative court, the Council of State. The area in question is Lynginous, on Patmos's northern coast, a stretch of protected farmland and beach that sits outside the island's approved building zones. In 2001, Patmos was given some of Greece's strictest zoning protections to prevent the kind of overdevelopment that has scarred other Aegean islands. Despite those laws, a local council decision in 2010 allowed a landowner to widen an old footpath into a road, which then "legitimised" the subdivision of the area into 11 plots and the issuing of building permits. The environmental group ELLET challenged that in court and won in 2018, with the Council of State annulling the original municipal decision. A second ruling from the Piraeus Administrative Court of Appeal followed, and then a third, unanimous, final ruling from the full Council of State in 2023, which stated plainly that no plot without frontage on a legally existing road can be built on. In June 2024, just months after that final ruling, the Urban Planning Office of Kalymnos issued a fresh building permit on the same plot to the same owner and the same architect, and construction began again. The architect, rather than complying, called the Council of State a "Leninist-style vanguard" waging "jihad against all construction" and described the 2023 ruling as a "shameless distortion" of the law and a "judicial coup." When the local environmental group Hippocampus published a press release criticising the new construction attempt, the architect responded with a defamation complaint against every member of its board. In July 2024, he and the landowner also filed a defamation complaint against the president of ELLET, Lydia Karra. A third complaint followed in October 2024 against the president of the Patmian community association, over Facebook posts about the same dispute. These are textbook eco-SLAPP actions, meaning legal complaints filed not to win in court...