Where just hours ago there were thick rows of trees, now stumps protrude and smoke still rises from scorched soil. On one road in Chalandri, a hilltop village above Athens, a family returns to see their house charred, with bedsheets – left on the line to dry in the sun – now blackened. The teenage son is in tears.
Next door, inside the office of an events company, firefighters found the burned body of the first person to be killed in the blaze. The unnamed woman who perished had worked at the company for 20 years, and had shut herself in the bathroom as the fire swept through the village. Outside, the ground is strewn with roses, now burned, which would have been used to decorate this summer’s weddings and baptisms organized by the company.
Greece’s worst wildfire of the year has eased for now, but firefighters are still working to put out the last of the blaze. After the fire started over the weekend, it tore through more than 156 square miles (400 square kilometers) of forests in the Attica region and up to the suburbs of Athens. Thousands of residents were evaucated.
“At some point, the fire went faster than the cars,” Vasilis Xypolitas, mayor of Kifisia municipality on the outskirts of Athens, told CNN. “On the mountain, there were no roads to stop the trucks and to fight the actual fire.”
Although wildfires have become an annual occurrence in Greece, none have reached so close to Athens, a city of more than 3 million people. Residents in nearby villages said they were shocked by how fast the fire had spread.
“We saw the fire at the top of the hill. We blinked, and it was basically in front of us,” a man in the village of Penteli, who declined to be named, told CNN.
Another resident said she couldn’t understand how a fire which began more than 40 kilometers (25 miles) away reached the village so quickly. Her car, like scores of others lining the roads that climb out of Athens, was burned. The rubber of the tires, the glass of the windows and fabric of the seating was scorched away, leaving just a carcass of blistered metal.
Emergency crews worked through the night to try to extinguish the fire, which began Sunday afternoon near the town of Varnavas. More than 700 firefighters, nearly 200 vehicles and 35 water-bombing aircraft were deployed to battle the blaze, Greek public broadcaster ERT reported.
Despite the efforts of fire crews, they were hugely aided by the dying down of the wind on Tuesday, which had reached up to 40 mph (65 kph) over the weekend. The fire hazard threat level was set to level 4 out of 5 on Tuesday, and is forecast to fall to a level 3 on Wednesday for the Athens region, according to the Ministry of Climate Crisis and Civil Protection in Greece. Winds are, however, expected to pick up again on Thursday.
Once the winds and the worst of the blaze abated, residents in Chalandri returned to inspect the damage. A woman named Sophia, whose house was mostly spared but whose awnings were burned, despaired: “This was our land. This was our air and our breath. And it’s completely gone.”
Although wildfires are common in Greek summers, climate scientists say that unusually hot and dry weather linked to global warming make the blazes fiercer and more common. Greek authorities have battled dozens of blazes already this summer after enduring its hottest June and July on record.
“In the next year we will have many incidents like this one, and we must find solutions in the way of evacuating,” said Xypolitas, the mayor.
The family in Chalandri whose house was burned said the government was providing emergency accommodation for two nights, but then they would be left to their own devices.
