AP News, August 29th, 2007
Columns of yellow-brown smoke billowed from behind a mountain and flames shot from a high ridge before leaping toward us.
This Greek village was in a ring of fire and so was I _ racing away from the blaze and approaching it to snap pictures, trapped with panicky townspeople and drenched by a welcome curtain of foamy, salty liquid dropped by a firefighting plane.
Varvasaina was at the middle of a vast series of fires burning out of control in the country's southern Peloponnese peninsula. Nearly all the 64 people who died in the blazes that began late on the evening of Aug. 23 perished in this region.
Just a half-hour drive to the southeast lies the village of Artemida, where 24 people including a mother and her four children perished in a single afternoon. To the east is Olympia _ site of the ancient Olympic Games _ where firefighters on Sunday battled a blaze that nearly destroyed the World Heritage site.
Before the fires, Olympia was a place of solemn lushness surrounded by pine and cypress groves. Afterward, the hills around it emitted a lurid glow from countless embers burning into the night _ even the waxing moon was bathed in a reddish glow.
Greeks were stunned by the swiftness of the conflagration.
"It came down from the north in just 10 minutes, burning everything," a fire official from Olympia told me. "All the beauty that Olympia had, it's gone."
Everyone in Varvasaina knew about the wildfires, but few were prepared for the inferno that burst so violently into their lives.
"There it is! It's coming!" shouted a group of townspeople gathered Sunday in a dirt clearing at the town's edge, as they stared at the blaze snaking up the road.
Suddenly a tree about a football field's length away burst into a fireball and a whirlwind of ash and grit whipped our faces.
Panic gripped us as we realized what had happened: We'd been engulfed in the backdraft of an exploding firestorm.
The swirling gale was being pushed by the wall of flames shooting into the sky and tearing through the rugged, forested countryside. The blaze hissed and crackled and roared, spewing acrid smoke.
We ran down the road toward the village, shielding our stinging eyes as flames burst from the back of a nearby house.
I jumped into my car to escape the fumes and flying ash, negotiating a tight U-turn while trying not to hit villagers fleeing on foot.
"We're burning! We're burning!" an aged woman in a dirty orange scarf shouted.
People poured from their homes, holding their heads and running down the road. One young girl was in flip-flops. A pair of snarling dogs raced past in the opposite direction toward the flames.
I stopped abruptly near a group of villagers standing in the road trying to will a distant firefighting airplane our way: "Help the houses, not the forests!" one man shouted skyward.
A second plane appeared, cutting a sharp turn and swooping low overhead. Suddenly we were drenched by a welcome curtain of foamy, salty liquid that had rained down to douse the flames.
Farther up the road a wild-eyed man ran down the steps of his home, brandishing a shotgun and shouting: "What shall we do! We have to protect our property!"
A few houses away, a wailing man in blue shorts and T-shirt fumbled with a set of keys, trying to open his door as flames appeared on the roof.
"Don't open it!" a neighbor shouted at him. "You'll let in air and it will burn more."
The man clambered up a ladder and tossed a half-full bucket of water toward the flames consuming the wooden timbers of his home.
Less than an hour later, the house was a smoldering ruin filled with charred roof tiles.
The keys were still in the lock.
I got back into the car and went down to the village's lower square, where a traffic jam ensued as villagers, ordered to evacuate, nearly collided with fire trucks rushing in with sirens blaring.
Unable to budge, I got out to take a photo of smoke billowing from two palm trees next to a large house. A policeman started screaming: "To hell with your photos! Get going from here!"
Villagers shouted at a speeding fire truck to stop. A volunteer firefighter in blue overalls sobbed into his cellular phone while another man walked through the crowd handing out white surgical masks.
I ran to the upper square with some villagers, where a man ripped a green branch from a tree and began beating a burning bush. A second man rifled through a trash can for bottles, pouring the remains on the fire.
Varvasaina's fire was extinguished and no villagers were killed.
But the devastation conjured up only one image.
"It's hell, everywhere," a villager said.
