Wildfire

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.

The adverse  impact on air quality from the wildfires that engulfed different parts of Greece will be protracted, Athanasios Nenes, a professor of atmospheric processes at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, tells Kathimerini.

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.

Smoke from the forest fires burning in Greece has spread across most of the Eastern Mediterranean, with the National Observatory of Athens' Meteo meteorological service reporting that the Thrace blazes in particular are releasing enormous volumes of microparticles that have now made their way to Malta and southern Italy.

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". 

Advancing flames devoured forests and homes as dozens of wildfires raged across Greece on Wednesday, leaving 20 people dead over the past three days.