No Respite in Greece as Wildfires Incinerate Ancient Olive Groves in Makri

Greece has seen no respite from the cat­a­strophic wild­fires this sum­mer.

After the dev­as­tat­ing fires of July, a new wave of wild­fires broke out across the coun­try, mainly affect­ing the north­west­ern out­skirts of Athens, includ­ing the Parnitha National Park, the Viotia region in cen­tral Greece and the north­ern regions of Rodopi and Evros.

The fires have trag­i­cally claimed human lives and destroyed liveli­hoods, forc­ing hun­dreds of peo­ple to flee their homes in the impacted areas. 

In Evros, bor­der­ing Turkey, res­cuers found 18 burned bod­ies near the Dadia for­est, believed to be migrants try­ing to cross Greece.

Meteorologists had warned of dan­ger­ous hot-dry-windy (HDW) con­di­tions pre­vail­ing over much of the coun­try from August 20^th. The HDW index deter­mines which days the atmos­pheric con­di­tions can make a wild­fire dif­fi­cult to con­trol.

“In my 32 years of ser­vice, I have never expe­ri­enced sim­i­lar extreme con­di­tions,” Yiorgos Pournaras, head of the Greek fire ser­vice, told a press brief­ing.

However, accord­ing to a report in the New York Times, the coun­try has failed to imple­ment ade­quate pre­ven­tive mea­sures against wild­fires, such as dig­ging fire­breaks and clear­ing brush and grasses from forests.

In north­east­ern Greece, a fire that erupted near the port city of Alexandroupolis has already rav­aged more than 7,500 hectares of for­est land and crops, also threat­en­ing the nearby set­tle­ments of Makri, Dikella and Agia Paraskevi.

Fanned by strong winds, the flames quickly engulfed the tra­di­tional Makri olive grove, a con­tin­u­ously cul­ti­vated area com­pris­ing more than 200,000 trees of the indige­nous Makri vari­ety, some of which are thou­sands of years old.

As the fire advanced, con­sum­ing olive trees, equip­ment and build­ings, local olive oil pro­duc­ers were left in despair.

“The fire tore right through our groves,” Dimitris Adamidis, owner of the local Konos com­pany, told Olive Oil Times.

“Many of our olive trees and part of our ware­houses and equip­ment were destroyed,” Adamidis con­tin­ued. ​“Our mill remained intact, but the dam­age is incal­cu­la­ble. Our burned cen­te­nar­ian Makri trees can­not be replaced in any way.”

Other pro­duc­ers in the area of Makri nar­rowly escaped the rag­ing flames.

“The whole moun­tain was rav­aged,” said Valia Kellidou of Kyklopas. “[Our mill] would have burned if the blaze came down toward the sea. We oper­ated all our wells and fought the flames for three days.”

Kelidou also noted that an esti­mate of the dam­age caused to the area’s olive trees is impos­si­ble at the moment.

Makri is the north­ern­most area of Greece where olive trees are cul­ti­vated, with a micro­cli­mate that gives rel­a­tively dry sum­mers and cold win­ters.

The area pro­duces the Protected Designation of Origin-cer­ti­fied Makri olive oil, with yields rang­ing from 1,000 to 3,000 tons each sea­son.

According to the European Climate Change Service Copernicus, the wild­fire in north­east­ern Greece is the largest recorded on European soil in years, hav­ing already burned more than 75,000 hectares.

The over­all toll of wild­fires in Greece this year is excep­tion­ally high: around 128,000 hectares of land have been burned since the begin­ning of 2023, a mas­sive 195 per­cent more than the aver­age area destroyed by fires in the coun­try each year.

• Agronews
• The New York Times
• Reuters