Tornadoes of Fire Approach the Parthenon

[Image: Photo by Milos Bicanski/Getty Images, for The New York Times].

The massive system of wildfires burning right now in Greece, passing well into their third day and even threatening the perimeter of Athens itself – indeed, "racing" through the capital's outer suburbs and now visible from the Parthenon – presents international fire crews with a disaster burning "so hot that it [has] generated its own weather," the New York Times reports. There are "fire tornadoes swirling within the blaze, columns of smoke shooting up hundreds of feet and heat-created wind scattering flames in all directions."

Aside from genuine alarm at the scale and intensity of the blaze, I'm reminded of another book by W.G. Sebald, On The Natural History of Destruction. Paraphrasing from memory, Sebald offers incredible descriptions of bomb-induced fire storms whirling through the streets of Hamburg and Dresden, often forming tornadoes of fire, melting glass, and fueled by superhot vacuums. Huge voids are burning in the air of the city, racing through the streets faster than automobiles. The flames reached such horrifying temperatures that the cities Sebald describes became literal crematoria, incinerating everything – before collapsing in and on themselves as the fires burned out, leaving ash-covered piles of stone and brick behind.

Of course, this is an overly morbid image to conjure up right now – but the idea that these wildfires are generating their own weather systems as they move across the summer-dry hills toward the city, is both terrible and astonishing.

(Note: Oddly, between starting this blog post and finishing it, the New York Times seems to have removed the description of the fire-made weather, uploading a different article at the same link).