Horrific Greek Fires

The climate is similar to California's, and thus they experience what we sometimes experience:

The fire reportedly came over a ridge first to Makistos, a village of 60 homes. Antonios Kokkaliaris, 80, a farmer, said he had been reading his paper, underlining parts he liked, when he heard the bell in St. John’s church ring.

“I went out and I saw the flames before me and people running,” he said. He could not leave, he said, because his wife, Koula, 82, is severely disabled. He said he took her downstairs. “I told her, ‘Stay put, we’re going to fight this out.’ I grabbed onto the hose and I started dousing left, right and center.”

The town emptied, with only him, a herdsman and Mr. Dimopoulos with his wine staying behind. He managed to douse his home, and two next door, well enough that the fires howled past, leaving his house intact. He described the experience as “horror, complete horror.”

But when it was over, he did not feel relief.

“I was disappointed, honestly,” he said. “Because not only was there no one to help me, there was no one in sight. ‘Am I just standing here alone? What happened to all my townspeople? What is the purpose of life if I am all alone?’ ”

The fire quickly ripped into Artemida, about two miles away. Residents piled into cars down the road toward Zaharo, the area’s main town, on the Aegean Sea. Mr. Alexandropoulos, at the time in Zaharo, said he heard that the flames reached his village and called his mother, who was taking care of his son, Phillipos.

“I didn’t even speak with her,” he said. “I just said, ‘I’m coming. Get going.’

“I just didn’t make it,” he said.

He could not, according to several accounts, because fire had swept across the road to the village, blocking off cars in both directions. Ms. Paraskevopoulos, her car full of her children and possibly others, turned around along with another car. In the smoke and confusion, there was an accident with other fleeing cars and a fire truck, which rolled over. Everyone in the convoy, several of them elderly, fled up a slope into the olive groves, where they died.

“I thought of nothing — just death,” said Vassilis Mitros, 28, who was among a party who saw the bodies — he counted 24 — early the next morning.

Now the once-lovely hills are burnt to white ash, with olive trees like blackened skeletons planted after death. All but 14 of the 60 homes here were seriously damaged or destroyed completely; in Artemida, 17 of the 70 houses were lost (but Ms. Paraskevopoulos’s house was intact). The region normally produces 10,000 tons of oil, but nearly all the trees are now destroyed, along with countless livelihoods. Charred donkeys and chickens litter ruined farms.

“This village is literally wiped out,” Ms. Bammi said. “It’s not just those who have been killed. Those who are left have no fields to work in, no olive trees. They have nothing to look forward to.”

“The new children who grow up in this town will not know what an olive tree looks like,” she said.

In late afternoon, Mr. Dimopoulos’s wife, Maria, 56, decided to lay down a bunch of white daisies on the spot where her cousins, Nikos and Maria Dimopoulos, the unmarried brother and sister, both in their 70s, died. The three of them had been fleeing the fire together when a police officer stopped and urged them to get into his car. Ms. Dimopoulos did, but the other two did not want to leave their donkey, their only possession of value.

“I told you, ‘Come with me!’ ” she said, laying the flowers down next to the dead donkey on the side of the road. “You wouldn’t come. Why wouldn’t you come?”