Rhodes

Tourists at a seaside hotel on the Greek island of Rhodes snatched up pails of pool water and damp towels as flames approached, rushing to help staffers and locals extinguish one of the wildfires threatening Mediterranean locales during recent heat waves.

Tourists at a seaside hotel on the Greek island of Rhodes snatched up pails of pool water and damp towels as flames approached, rushing to help staffers and locals extinguish one of the wildfires threatening Mediterranean locales during recent heat waves.

The examples of the islands of Rhodes and Paros, where citizens have risen up against unlawful beach occupation, are rapidly being replicated.

In many parts of Greece, citizens are organizing and seeking ways to get assistance from the central state, as they feel useless at the local level.

Greece will offer a free week of vacation on the island of Rhodes in the eastern Aegean to those tourists who were forced to interrupt their stay due to the recent wildfires, Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis said on Wednesday.

The president of the Hellenic Association of Travel & Tourist Agencies (HATTA), Lysandros Tsilidis, has said that the summer season and especially August is not expected to see a drop in tourism flows to Greece as a result of the wildfires on Rhodes and other destinations. 

Some 50,000 olive trees and 2,500 animals and beehives were destroyed in the recent fires on the Dodecanese island of Rhodes, according to an initial estimate by the Ministry of Rural Development and Food.

Most of the damage to the island's plant capital was in the areas of Apollona, Asklipio, Gennadi and Vati, a team from the Hellenic Agricultural Insurance Organization established.

Firefighters, assisted by Civil Protection forces and dedicated volunteers, battled the flames for yet another night in multiple locations, including the islands of Rhodes and Corfu, Karystos on the island of Evia, and Dervenaki, near Aigio in the northern Peloponnese.

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."

Most of the 53 new wildfires that broke out in the country in the last 24 hours were "dealt with immediately, in their initial stages," the Fire Service has said in its daily bulletin.

"Powerful ground and air forces … are operating at the fire fronts, the most important of which are developing in Rhodes and Corfu," it said.

Authorities have called on people in Plimmiri and Lachania, two southern Rhodes villages, to evacuate in the direction of Apolakkia due to wildfires in the area in a message sent via the emergency number 112.

A short time earlier, residents in Genadi and Vati, also on Rhodes, were ordered to evacuate to Lindos, for the same reason.