Rhodes: On Monday, authorities forced nearly 2,500 people to leave the Greek island of Corfu as the prime minister issued a dire warning that the country was "at war" with several wildfires and predicted three challenging days.

On the island of Rhodes, tens of thousands of people have already fled fires, with many terrified tourists rushing to board evacuation flights to return home.

A fire service spokesman said that from Sunday into Monday, about 2,400 tourists and locals were evacuated from the tourist island of Corfu in the Ionian Sea. He added that the evacuations were precautionary.

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On Monday, fires were also raging on Evia, the second-largest island in Greece.

Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis told lawmakers that the country faced "another three difficult days ahead" before the high temperatures are expected to subside. "We are at war and are exclusively geared towards the fire front," he said.

Greece's minister of civil protection, Vassilis Kikilias, reported that firefighters had been battling more than 500 fires for 12 straight days.

Greece has been experiencing prolonged periods of extreme heat, which has increased the risk of wildfires and left tourists stranded during the busiest travel season.

The government's quick evacuation followed a tragedy in 2018 when more than 100 people died in Mati, close to Athens, in Greece's deadliest forest fire, which Mitsotakis said on Monday still "haunts us all."

An annual event to commemorate the restoration of democracy in Greece in 1974 was postponed on Monday due to the wildfires. Rhodes is one of the top vacation spots in Greece, with 2.5 million tourists expected there in 2022.

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Travel goliath TUI announced on Monday that it would stop offering vacation packages to Rhodes until Friday.

On Saturday, when the evacuations were ordered, Greek television showed pictures of long lines of people, some wearing beachwear, dragging suitcases along the island's roads.

Kelly Squirrel, a transport administrator from the United Kingdom, told AFP at Rhodes airport, "We walked for about six hours in the heat."
The largest-ever wildfire evacuation in the nation took place over the weekend as about 30,000 people fled the flames on Rhodes.

Police reported that 16,000 people had been evacuated by land and 3,000 by sea. Others had to leave the area after being instructed to do so and had to travel by car or on foot.

Daniel-Cladin Schmidt, a 42-year-old German tourist waiting to be evacuated with his wife and nine-year-old son, said, "We are exhausted and traumatised."

We had to walk for more than two hours because there were thousands of people and the buses couldn't get through.
We simply covered our faces and continued moving because we were unable to breathe.
Tourists and some locals stayed the night on the island in gyms, schools, and conference rooms of hotels.

AFP observed large groups of tourists dozing off on the floor in the international airport's departures area while being surrounded by luggage.

Kevin Sales, an English engineer, told AFP that "we had to lend a woman some of my wife's clothes because she had nothing to wear." "It was awful."
In addition to helping to transport foreigners home, a number of travel agencies have stopped operating their flights carrying tourists to Rhodes.

In order to escape the flames, we ran 10 kilometres (six miles) with all of our luggage while it was 42 degrees Celsius (108 degrees Fahrenheit), according to German traveller Lena Schwarz, who arrived at Hanover airport overnight on Sunday into Monday.

According to the 38-year-old, their departure from Rhodes was "hell on Earth." A 50-year-old passenger at Hanover named Oxana Neb described the evacuation as "very bad."

"We stayed in the hotel right up until the very end, and fire came from all sides," she recalled. She later left her suitcases on the way, she claimed, and ran to the beach with the other visitors.

Similar to every summer, tens of thousands of hectares of forest and vegetation are destroyed by deadly forest fires in Greece.

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According to experts, Greece had one of the longest heatwaves in recent memory this summer, with temperatures reaching 45 degrees Celsius on the weekend.

Although temperatures dropped on Monday, it was predicted that they would rise again on Tuesday and Wednesday. Tuesday, along with Crete, Rhodes is still on the highest level of fire alert.