Deadly wildfires force thousands to evacuate in Turkey and Greece
Turkey has been battling blazes for weeks but high winds and soaring temperatures — which hit a record 122.9 degrees on Friday, local media reported, citing the Turkish State Meteorological Service — have hampered firefighters. The fires have killed at least 17 people in recent weeks.
'We are going through risky days,' Forestry Minister Ibrahim Yumakli told reporters on Sunday. 'This is not something that will stop in two days or three days.'
Turkey was 'waging a major battle both in the air and on the ground against forest fires,' President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said the same day in an online statement. More than 3,000 fires had been extinguished across the country since the start of summer, he said.
The worst blazes were near Bursa — the country's fourth-largest city, about 100 miles by car from Istanbul — where 2,300 firefighters were deployed on Sunday, Yumakli said.
Firefighters worked overnight as the blaze crept along the ridgelines of the hilly terrain outside the city of roughly 3 million people.
Orhan Saribal, an opposition member of parliament representing Bursa, described the scene as 'an apocalypse' as he spoke to a local TV station against the backdrop of a burning forest on Saturday night.
By Sunday, the number of active fires had dropped from 84 to 44, including some blazes in northern and southern Turkey, Yumakli said. More than 3,000 people had been evacuated.
Wildfires also burned over the weekend in Bulgaria, Albania, Montenegro and Greece, where explosions could be heard in villages near Athens as blazes reached factories with flammable material, Reuters reported. Residents of at least one suburb of the Greek capital received alerts to evacuate.
Southern Europe has been bit by heat waves this summer that have depleted water reservoirs and turned forests into tinderboxes.
In the resort town of Cesme on Turkey's Mediterranean coast, officials have implemented overnight water cuts as supplies run low, according to local media.
The fires in Turkey have killed at least 17 people in recent weeks, including 10 rescue volunteers and forestry workers who died in Eskisehir province last week, according to the Associated Press. Another firefighter died from a heart attack over the weekend, Bursa's mayor said in an online statement. Three people were also killed when a tanker delivering water to firefighters rolled off the road on Sunday, according to local officials.
Though wildfires are common in southern Europe this time of year, they are becoming more frequent and intense as the weather gets hotter and drier because of climate change, scientists say.
'The number of days of high or extreme fire danger in southern Europe is already at levels we thought we wouldn't see until 2050,' Jesus San Miguel, a senior researcher at the European Commission's Joint Research Centre, told The Washington Post in 2023. 'Because of climate change, we are going much faster than we thought.'
Erdogan on Sunday said he prayed for all those 'who became martyrs in the fight against the fires,' adding that the country remained on 'high alert day and night.'
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