Emergency management

Blazes in Greece burned for a seventh day on Friday, destroying tens of thousands of hectares of land in the northeast alone, in what the EU-backed Copernicus Climate Change Service said was the largest recorded wildfire on European soil in years.

Authorities battling a major wildfire in northeastern Greece that has been described as the European Union's largest single recorded fire have recovered another body, the fire department said Friday, bringing the total death toll from wildfires in Greece this week to 21.

In the charred Greek landscape close to the border with Turkey, a group of blackened corpses lay amid the ashes of what was once a lush forest that offered migrants the perfect cover to cross into the European Union. Two of the dead found this week were children.

Firefighters struggled Thursday against strong winds and hot, dry conditions to tame multiple wildfires ravaging Greece, including one in the country's northeast that officials say is the largest recorded in the European Union.

Firefighters struggled Thursday against strong winds and hot, dry conditions to tame multiple wildfires ravaging Greece, including one in the country's northeast that officials say is the largest recorded in the European Union.

More than 120,000 hectares of land have burned across Greece in 2023 up until Wednesday according to the National Observatory of Athens' Meteo.gr.

At the same time, the European Observatory of Forest Fires noted the 2023 Greece wildfires' burned land area is three times larger than the average annually burned land since 2006.

Socialist opposition leader Nikos Androulakis on Thursday said the destruction caused by the wildfires that burned on the mountain range of Rhodope in Xanthi, northern Greece, the previous days caused a "biblical catastrophe". 

Significant steps have been taken to create a modern civil protection mechanism, yet developments show that planning falls short.

There is a very high fire risk on Thursday in the regions of Attica and the region of Central Greece ( Viotia and the island of Evia), according to the Fire Risk Forecast Map issued by the General Secretariat for Civil Protection at the Climate Crisis and Civil Protection Ministry.

The Bulgarian government decided at its meeting today that Bulgaria will provide new humanitarian aid to Ukraine in the amount of 293,376 leva due to Russia's ongoing aggression. The funds come from the budget of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.