‘My life stopped’: Local people say they lost all in Rhodes wildfires

Standing outside the blackened shell of what used to be his restaurant, Dimitris Hajifotis laments a livelihood lost to wildfires raging on the Greek island of Rhodes this week.

"My life now stopped," he said. "Everything is taken by the fire."

Inside his destroyed business in the coastal village of Gennadi, stacks of plates are covered in ash and debris near a burned-down kitchen.

The wildfires on the Aegean island have been burning for a week, forcing 20,000 people, most of them tourists, to flee in the scorching heat over the weekend, some on foot, others by sea as the nighttime sky turned an apocalyptic orange.

The flames swallowed up trees, burned cars, damaged homes and hotels and left animals dead in the streets.

About 10% of the island's land area had burned, according to the Greek state broadcaster ERT, but the scale of the destruction...