Athens. Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis on Thursday called for “absolute vigilance” in the face of a new heat wave hitting his country, with temperatures expected to reach 45°C this weekend.
Faced with the new heat wave, the authorities announced that all archaeological sites will be closed during the hottest hours of the day.
“We need absolute vigilance (…) because the difficult times are not behind us yet,” warned Mitsotakis.
“We are facing a new heat wave” and “a possible strengthening of the winds” that have already fueled several fires around Athens since Monday, he added.
The archaeological sites closed their doors at noon and will reopen at 5:30 p.m., except for the Acropolis, which due to a strike by security guards will not receive visitors until 8:00 p.m.
The measure will apply until Sunday.
Red Cross employees distributed bottles of water to visitors near the monument, the most visited in the country, when temperatures touched 38 °C on Thursday at noon in the capital.
After a first heat wave last week, the thermometers will rise again to 43 °C on Thursday and up to 45 °C over the weekend in the center of the country.
“What worries us is that the forecasts indicate a new increase in temperatures next week. It would be a heat wave of more than fifteen days, that is, the longest in the history of Greece,” Kostas Lagouvardos, from the Institute for environmental research at the National Observatory of Athens, told AFP.
In the center of the capital, the inhabitants tried to maintain their occupations despite the heat.
“I am used to high temperatures. We have them every summer, but what is difficult this year is that heat waves keep happening,” said Christos Boyiatzis, a shoeshine boy from Kolonaki, a business district of Athens.
Kostas Leventouris, a newspaper vendor, decided to close his kiosk earlier “due to the heat”.
Instead, the situation improved in terms of forest fires that burned thousands of hectares in recent days.
Hundreds of firefighters were still fighting some still active pockets west of Athens.
“Firefighters fought 200 fires in three days, in extreme weather conditions,” Civil Protection Minister Vassilis Kikilias told Skai radio.
The risk of fires remains high for Attica – the peripheral region to the capital – the Peloponnese peninsula (southwest) and central Greece, according to the Civil Protection.
On the tourist island of Rhodes, where a forest fire broke out two days ago, five planes and five helicopters were still fighting the flames.
