“[It’s] the first time ever the fire has come here,” said Melina Kritseli, 40, a civil servant living in a two-storey white house in Patima Halandriou, another Athens suburb that was evacuated.
“I took my children to a friend’s house to be safe,” she told AFP as her husband hosed the ground and grass outside their house.
Television footage showed several cars gutted by fire and the roofs of stately homes burning as water-bombing helicopters roared overhead.
“The situation is dramatic,” Natassa Kosmopoulou, the Penteli mayor, told news portal.
“A school and homes are on fire, and I can see the fire coming towards the town hall,” she said.
To the north, at the epicentre of the fire, firefighters and residents took stock of the damage: abandoned homes and vehicles gutted by fire; hillsides blackened; trees reduced to sticks.
“Thirty years I was building all this,” said 81-year-old Vassilis Stroubelis as he stood in the entrance of his damaged home. “Thirty years and bam.”
