Greece wildfires: Volunteer firefighter among two dead as blazes rip across country

‘We’re talking about the apocalypse, I don’t know how to describe it’

Two people have been killed – one of them a volunteer firefighter – as uncontrolled wildfires continue to rip across Greece.

Residents living on the northern outskirts of Athens have been urged to leave homes as flames now bear down on the capital’s suburbs.

In total, some 150 fires have been reported across the country with hundreds of firefighters and nearly 20 water-bombing aircraft being deployed in a so-far-unsuccessful bid to tame the flames.

One 38-year-old volunteer was killed by a falling electricity pole as he battled with flames near Athens. Another victim, Konstantinos Michalos, was found dead in a factory close to where a fire was raging.

A further 20 people have been injured, while the number of properties destroyed or damaged is expected to run into the thousands.

In one terrifying video, residents and tourists can be seen fleeing the island of Evia on a ferry as a vast wall of flames towers above them from the shore.

"We're talking about the apocalypse, I don't know how to describe it," a coastguard Sotiris Danikas told the country’s broadcaster ERT.

The devastation comes as Greece grapples with a summer of sustained extreme weather: temperatures have been smashing the 40C mark all this week. It is the longest heatwave there in 30 years.

Prime minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis said it was the "the reality of climate change".

Although the fires are not expected to cause the devastation of those three years ago when more than 100 people died across the country, the alarm across Greece is reported to be palpable.

“It’s a biblical catastrophe,” said Eleni Drakoulakou, deputy mayor of East Mani in the southern Peloponnese region. “We’re talking about three-quarters of the municipality [destroyed].”

Speaking on Friday evening, civil protection chief Nikos Hardalias said: “Over the past few days, we have been facing a situation without precedent in our country, in the intensity and wide distribution of the wildfires, and the new outbreaks all over.”

And government minister Nikos Hardalias said: “Wildfires of unprecedented intensity and spread, all our forces are fighting the battle day and night to save lives, together with volunteers.”

Greece is not alone in the region struggling with such wildfires. In Turkey, authorities have spent the last month battling some of the country's worst blazes in decades.

Eight people have been killed and tens of thousands evacuated along the country’s southern coast.