Nearly 100,000 hectares of forestry and farmland have burned in less than two weeks in Greece which is still battling wildfires for the tenth day on Thursday.
The fires are fuelled by an extraordinary heatwave that struck at the beginning of August.
Greece has evacuated around 20 villages on the Peloponnese, though ancient Olympia, site of the first Olympic Games, escaped the inferno.
About 580 Greek firefighters, helped by colleagues from Cyprus, France, Britain, Germany and the Czech Republic, were battling blazes in Gortynia, near Olympia.
Flare-ups continued to ravage Evia, Greece‘s second-largest island, just off the mainland east of Athens and scene of some of the worst devastation in the past week.
“If helicopters and water bombing planes had come right away and operated for six, seven hours, the wildfire would have been put out in the first day,” said cafe owner Thrasyvoulos Kotzias, 34, gazing at an empty beach in the resort of Pefki on Evia.
Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis has called it a “nightmarish summer” and has apologised for failures in tackling some of the more than 500 wildfires that have raged across Greece.