“It’s hot,” said Panagiotis Vahaviolos, with some understatement. “So hot it’s a little difficult to move.” On the hottest day of the longest and most intense heatwave to befall Greece since record-keeping began, the restaurateur had sought sanctuary in the shadows to escape the fierce sun.
Neither he, nor anyone else, if they could help it, was moving in Mystras, the settlement beneath the great hilltop fortress that is the country’s most significant Byzantine site. In temperatures nudging 44C, life had come to a standstill. With the exception of holidaymakers who had reached the village’s flag-stoned central square, there were few people to be seen.
“To think, 30 or 40 years ago our fathers and grandfathers would be reaping and threshing at this time of year,” Vahaviolos said, shaking his head in disbelief. “Now at this time of day you only see tourists in the square. Everyone else is indoors.”
Vahaviolos, 60, has spent most of his life in Mystras, at first helping out his father who owned a tavern in the plaza and then opening one himself more than 30 years ago. He has known heat but nothing quite like these past few weeks. “I do think we’ve all got a bit spoiled with air conditioning,” he chuckled, “but in my lifetime I never imagined this”.
In the third wave of the mercury exceeding 40C, the so-called “heat attack” engulfing the Mediterranean country finally peaked on Wednesday.
More than two weeks after the extreme weather phenomenon first struck, an estimated 8.5 million people were facing temperatures above 41C and 120,000 faced 46C. Forecasters did not rule out the prospect of the thermometer rising to 47C.
The ministry of labour declared a ban on any outside work in the afternoon hours under threat of stiff fines. Archaeological sites were similarly closed nationwide.
At 8.30am when Panayiota Boursoula opened Mystras’s sole pharmacy, the heat had been “already pretty much unbearable”, she said. By 1pm, nearly five hours after she turned on the air conditioning, the temperature was hovering at about 27C inside the store. Business had been slow because most of the village was in self-imposed lockdown. “The older generation come out at 8am, go back inside at 10am and then reappear when it’s cooler in the evening,” she said. “No one is going about their chores, that’s for sure. But then I imagine it’s the same all over Greece today. Thank God it’s coming to an end.”
In a week when authorities have had to deal with 400 wildfires, according to the climate crisis and civil protection ministry, and people have been evacuated as blazes approached resorts, villages and towns, officials are ready for the great heat to break. Meteorologists predict a dramatic drop in temperatures from Thursday with rainstorms forecast over half of the country.
The heatwave has been as much an economic calamity as an ecological catastrophe. On Wednesday, before it was announced that two Greeks had lost their lives to flames, drones surveyed ancient olive groves and virgin pine forest burnt to cinders on Rhodes and Corfu, hundreds of people returned to homes left uninhabitable, and hoteliers and farmers took in scenes of devastation.
Highlighting the impact of the blazes in Rhodes, a state of civil protection emergency was declared in some areas in mid-afternoon to facilitate the process of assessing damages. The Greek prime minister, Kyriakos Mitsotakis, has vowed to compensate citizens for the loss of properties and businesses.
The government said it was also looking at ways of compensating affected tourists, after almost 20,000 tourists fled hotels in Rhodes at the weekend in the biggest evacuation of its kind in Greece. “We have contacted the chamber of hoteliers and we want to see how we can bring people with holiday vouchers back,” Olga Kefalogianni, the tourism minister, told Open TV.
Enjoying a beer in Mystras’s square, Jayne and Godfrey Wilkinson, British schoolteachers who retired to Greece six years ago, said they had experienced “furnace-like blasts of heat” through the windows of their car as they drove to the historic site.
“In Kalamata on Sunday it registered 45.5C, which was a record for us,” Godfrey said. “In New Zealand where we lived previously, we experienced 43C. Don’t get me started but everyone knew climate change was happening 30 years ago and nobody took it seriously. If you spoke up about it you were called a doomsayer and now we have come to this.”
