ATHENS, Greece — Shells of houses and cars left gutted by flames. Stretches of forest reduced to ash. Tourists evacuated by boat from once idyllic beaches where the skies are thick with smoke. As southern Europe grapples with one of its worst heat waves in decades, deadly forest fires have engulfed stretches of the region, bringing a newly reopened tourism industry to a halt and forcing mass evacuations.
The raging fires pushed residents from their homes in villages on the Greek mainland and islands and across neighboring Turkey, and forced tourists to abandon beachside destinations across the region.
Fires plagued Turkey’s southern coast for a ninth day Thursday, forcing thousands of people to evacuate by land and sea overnight. Video broadcast on Turkish television showed uncontrollable flames suddenly changing direction amid strong winds, trapping people.
Critics have attacked President Recep Tayyip Erdogan over the government’s handling of the deadly disaster, with opponents denouncing the lack of aerial support for the firefighting efforts.
Hundreds of square miles of forest burned as more than 180 fires blazed across the country. At least eight people died, hundreds were injured, and dozens lost their homes.
In Mugla, a Turkish province popular with tourists and full of farmland, residents angered by the uncontrolled fires blocked roadways and halted cars they deemed suspicious.
“Maybe they burned the forest,” shouted Muharrem Duygu, a resident of Mugla who was seen stopping a car in a video posted on Twitter. “My forest is in flames right now.”
Firefighters were able to control a fire approaching a power plant in Milas after working through the night to save the facility. Trees on the grounds of the power plant were burned, but the main site was not seriously damaged, officials said.
At ancient Olympia, the birthplace of the Olympic Games in southern Greece, local authorities and army personnel dug fire lines around the archaeological site to keep the flames at bay as firefighters battled the blazes through the night.
In a televised address to the nation Thursday night, Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis said the fires raging in Greece were “of massive dimensions and intensity” and appealed to the public to show caution, as a record-breaking heat wave had transformed the country into a “powder keg.”
Responding to vehement criticism of his government’s response to the fires by the political opposition and on social media, Mitsotakis said authorities had done what they could when faced with “a natural phenomenon of such a scale.” He added, “There will be time for criticism and self-criticism. But not now.”
The Greek government on Thursday increased the involvement of the military in tackling the fires. And the country has received support in the form of two firefighting planes from Cyprus. On Friday, further assistance will arrive from France, Romania, Sweden and Switzerland, Deputy Civil Protection Minister Nikos Hardalias said at a news conference Thursday night.
A large fire that broke out north of Athens Tuesday destroyed scores of homes and thousands of acres of forest. It had been partly contained but flared up again later in the day.
Tourists visiting the capital were met with a thick curtain of smoke hanging over the city’s iconic sites. A short distance north, residents were forced from their homes. Some tried in vain to use hoses to keep the flames from engulfing their properties as a fire rekindled north of Athens on Thursday afternoon and spread rapidly, prompting more evacuations — including at Malakasa, a state camp from which asylum-seekers would be evacuated to other facilities at the instruction of civil protection authorities, according to Greece’s migration ministry.
Earlier Thursday, Vasilis Vathrakoyiannis, a fire service spokesperson, said 120 fires were burning around the country, with the largest and most worrying at ancient Olympia and on the island of Evia.
On Wednesday afternoon, the Greek Coast Guard evacuated dozens of people from the seaside village of Rovies on the island after a huge fire moved through a nearby pine forest. Residents of several villages on the island were forced to abandon their homes, and local authorities and the army dug fire lines to try to protect a monastery. The local church in the village of Kechries sounded its bells early Thursday morning to urge its residents to flee.
In photos from the island, the sun was barely visible through the dense smoke that hung over cliffside homes.
Greek television channels flicked between video of the fires raging in the north of Athens, on Evia and on the Peloponnese peninsula, awakening memories of the summer of 2007 when Greece battled multiple large fires across the country that killed scores of people.
While scientists have not had time to evaluate the connection between the current wave of extreme temperatures and global warming, it fits an overall trend of climate change playing a role in extreme weather in Europe. Research has shown that in major heat waves across Europe in recent summers, climate change has been a significant worsening factor.
Efthymis Lekkas, a professor of natural disaster management at the University of Athens, warned of “an enduring nightmare in August” and urged authorities to be ready for potential flooding after the destruction of large stretches of forest.
Greece’s General Secretariat for Civil Protection warned of an “extreme” risk of fires Friday, as intense winds are forecast to worsen the situation.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
