For weeks, Turkey has been battling widespread and deadly wildfires across its northwestern regions, with blazes already claiming at least 17 lives. Fuelled by high winds and soaring temperatures that officially reached a record 122.9 degrees Fahrenheit last Friday, these fires have severely hampered firefighting efforts, forcing thousands to evacuate and prompting water restrictions at Mediterranean resorts.
On Sunday, Forestry Minister Ibrahim Yumakli warned reporters that Turkey was “going through risky days” and that the situation would not “stop in two days or three days.” President Recep Tayyip Erdogan echoed this concern the same day in an online statement, asserting that Turkey was “waging a major battle both in the air and on the ground against forest fires.” He added that over 3,000 fires had been extinguished nationwide since the start of summer.
According to Yumakli, the most severe blazes were concentrated near Bursa, Turkey’s fourth-largest city, located approximately 100 miles from Istanbul. On Sunday, 2,300 firefighters were deployed to this area, working overnight as the fires crept along the ridgelines of the hilly terrain surrounding the city of approximately three million residents. Orhan Saribal, an opposition member of parliament for Bursa, vividly described the scene as “an apocalypse” during a Saturday night interview with a local TV station, conducted with a burning forest in the background.
By Sunday, Yumakli reported a reduction in active fires nationwide, from 84 to 44, encompassing blazes in both northern and southern Turkey. Over 3,000 people had been evacuated from affected areas.
The wildfire crisis extended beyond Turkey over the weekend, with blazes also reported in Bulgaria, Albania, Montenegro, and Greece. In Greece, Reuters reported explosions in villages near Athens as fires reached factories containing flammable materials, prompting evacuation alerts for residents in at least one suburb of the capital.
This summer, Southern Europe has been severely impacted by intense heat waves, which have depleted water reservoirs and transformed forests into highly flammable tinderboxes. While wildfires are a seasonal occurrence in Southern Europe, scientists warn that climate change is making them increasingly frequent and intense due to hotter and drier conditions. This acceleration was highlighted by Jesus San Miguel, a senior researcher at the European Commission’s Joint Research Center, who told The Washington Post in 2023 that “The number of days of high or extreme fire danger in southern Europe is already at levels we thought we wouldn’t see until 2050,” adding, “Because of climate change, we are going much faster than we thought.”
