Surviving one of the world’s deadliest wildfires, in photos

On July 23, 2018, one of the world’s most deadly wildfires broke out just 30km (19 miles) northeast of Athens’ historical centre. The first report of the Attica wildfires came at 16:41; within two hours it laid to waste the sleepy, seaside villages of Neos Voutza, Mati and Kokkino Limanaki. Temperatures soared to 40C as wind gusts of 100km/​h whipped over the hillside, driving the people to the shore in the hopes the waters would keep them alive. 

That day, 104 people were killed in the tragedy, including 11 children, with another 14 – 18 unidentified victims later found. More than 170 people were injured, including 57 with excessive burns. As 12.6 sq km went up in flames – destroying over 3,500 structures, 300 vehicles, and displacing more than 4,000 people – the Greek Fire Department and Civil Protection Agency failed to adequately prepare for and respond to the inferno. 

At the time, it was the second deadliest wildfire of the 21^st century, and earlier this year 10 people, including former firefighting chiefs and disaster response officials, were sentenced to prison in the aftermath for criminal negligence leading to injury and loss of life.

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Artist Katerina Angelopoulou was visiting a local family friend with her elderly mother and three-year-old daughter when the fire broke out. Together they fled, waiting in the water as the interminable minutes stretched into hours, stranded without help. Angelopoulou followed her instinct to record what was happening on her phone, relying on her training in the theatre as a scenographer and set designer to document the moment as it unfolded. 

Afterwards, Angelopoulou was left to make sense of the tragedy and began consuming news reports in the hopes of finding answers to her innumerable questions. For a year she amassed materials, then showed a few photographs to her professor Paul Lowe, a British photojournalist who had documented the Yugoslav Wars during the mid-1990s. ​“He said: ​‘You need to work on this.’ And in the beginning, I didn’t want to,” Angelopoulou says. ​“I was not in a very stable place, and I thought by going into that, it would become much worse.” 

“The best way out is through,” poet Robert Frost famously wrote in 1915, a discipline known only to those whose courage is stronger than their fear. Angelopoulou returned to where it all began, mapping an unprecedented disaster for The Fumes of Mars (GOST Books), a cataclysmic tapestry that carries the weight of justice on behalf of the living and the dead. 

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Using the medium’s authoritative form to speak truth to power, Angelopoulou weaves her photographs made during and after the fire with survivor testimonies, aerial maps, weather and aircraft reports, CCTV and news coverage images, and details from the State Investigator report and trial. The book took years to assemble, a testament to her unwavering devotion. ​“I needed to do something, and I was carrying the responsibility it needs to tell the story of everyone, not just myself,” Angelopoulou says. ​“It is a collective story.” 

Making the book revealed horrors she could not otherwise know. Reading the survivor testimonies, Angelopoulou discovered one of the victims was just 20 meters away from her at their time of death, but the fire’s deafening blaze and blinding smoke drowned everything out. It was only upon reflection that she truly understood how close they had all come to such a fate.

The Fumes of Mars is the knowledge that justice and healing are two sides of the same coin, and a reminder that we must confront the realities of climate collapse with collective action that includes ongoing care for survivors. ​“People go through life crashing events like this, and then, like the fires in LA, the fires in Hawaii, the floods,” Angelopoulou says. ​“You think everything is stable and then suddenly, an extreme event happens, and everyone expects you to go back to normality the next day. It’s a very strange situation.”

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The Fumes of Mars by Katerina Angelopoulou is published by GOST Books.

Miss Rosen is a freelance arts and photography writer, follow her on X.

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