I’ve had my fair share of messages from friends abroad recently asking if it really is as hot as “they say” in Greece. Hot, I usually retort, doesn’t say it all. “It’s mind-meltingly blistering, baking from morning to night. You struggle to sleep, you struggle to eat, you’re ill-tempered and you can’t even drink; a consolatory sundown cocktail is usually the kiss of death.”
After the emojis and exclamation marks, the response has invariably been: “Well, over here it’s all cloud and rain, I’ll make sure to pack my factor 30+. Looking forward!”
It came as no surprise, then, to read that far from being deterred by Europe’s heatwave, holidaymakers are heading en masse to the Mediterranean.
Earnings at the likes of easyJet are so strong that its Swedish chief executive, Johan Lundgren, was able to gloat last week that the no-frills carrier is about to pull off another trimester of record pretax profits. More than 160,000 flights will operate between July and September. Very climate friendly!
British people, Lundgren noted, really didn’t mind the heat. They keep calm and carry on. “They are on holiday,” he said, “sitting by a pool or swimming in the Mediterranean and they have air-conditioned hotels.”
Except that this summer is different. And not only because it defies logic that any northern European really wants to sizzle in temperatures more normally associated with Iraq.
On Sunday, when you read these words, you should spare a thought for Thessalia, the central Greek region where the mercury is likely to hit 45C.
And then spare a thought for Athens, a forest-fire zone, experiencing its hottest July weekend in 50 years. Thermal cameras on drones have recorded road surface temperatures of 70C, while at the fifth-century BC Acropolis, officials say they will likely reach 48C, four degrees higher than the capital’s predicted 44C because of the lack of shade on the rocky outcrop among temples of marble and stone. Which is why the greatest monument known to man on the continent of Europe will be closed again – along with every other archaeological site during the afternoon hours in Greece.
Even at the best of times when the mercury hovers around the mid-30s (what a blessing that would be!), the sight of pale-skinned beachgoers lapping up the rays rarely ceases to amaze.
In resorts far and wide, be it on Greek islands or the mainland – or indeed in Italy and Spain, similarly being bludgeoned by extreme heat – there is a ker-ching element to such scenes that in economies so dependent on tourism cannot be ignored.
But, as Greece endures its second “heat storm” in as many weeks, with a third on the way, as wildfires burn and untold numbers flee their homes, as reports of heat-related deaths and injuries mount, they are spectacles that have also begun to border on the grotesque.
And as I write, I must count myself lucky. In recent days I, like nearly everyone else, have got far too overheated (on one occasion being forced to retire with a bad case of nausea after reporting from the tourist-saturated Acropolis), but I have not seen my property go up in flames, nor lost my earthly belongings, nor had a relative hospitalised, nor been forced to contend with the sickening discovery of a dead pet – as in the past it is animals that have suffered in the more than 100 conflagrations that have been raging around the Greek capital, on the Peloponnese and in islands such as Rhodes.
Such depredations have been for others: in most cases elderly Greeks who have survived war and famine and economic deprivation but not temperatures likened to silent killers prowling the nether reaches of villages and towns.
In a nation hardened to the reality of handling scorchers and with a lexicon to match – scientists in Athens, Europe’s southernmost metropolis, were the first globally, to name heatwaves – there suddenly seem to be no words to describe temperatures so record-breaking and prolonged. “Interminable and powerful” was how one weatherman put it on Saturday; “unprecedented” said another, but increasingly I am hearing another phrase. “Greece is becoming Dubai.”
Extreme weather calls for extreme measures and that has come in the form of public health officials and government ministries imploring people to work remotely and stay inside. “Don’t venture outdoors unnecessarily,” said one at an emergency health ministry meeting called last week. “Avoid coffee and alcohol, make sure older people and children are cool. Close the shutters!”
Athens now resembles a ghost town, because there is a new regimen to the 24-hour cycle, one that starts early, ends mid-morning and resumes in the “cooler” evening hours.
Yet, you still swelter during the day and you sweat at night. There is no respite because the cement buildings that line our cities were never meant to absorb such heat. Even the parrots, which usually move at supersonic speed through the skies, have taken, I noticed, to resting in the trees at oddly early hours.
Mercury spikes of this order were never meant to be; they were the stuff of science fiction, of places of shimmering heat haze, of deserts in the oil-rich Middle East. Not the Mediterranean, or even further east where the Mediterranean basin meets the Levant.
But the unpalatable truth is as clear as the blood-red sun that sets nightly over the Attic skies. From Spain to Cyprus, the Med is on fire. A region designated a global heating hotspot in the decades ahead is turbocharging, ahead of its time, into the climatic niche that ecowarriors feared.
And it will get worse, we are told. Heatwaves may already have “increased sixfold since the 1980s”, according to the World Meteorological Organization, but we should brace ourselves for the fact they will become ever more frequent and intense.
It might explain why everyone I know in Athens now dreams of holidaying in northern climes. Dreams that are bound to increase if heat lovers up north continue migrating south on journeys that can never be climate-friendly.
