Halkidiki & Northern Greece fire map
Halkidiki, Thessaloniki, Thassos, Pieria and Kavala. Pine forest runs to the shore on the Halkidiki peninsulas, which is what makes fire there serious.
What is happening in northern Greece now
| Area | Status | What it is |
|---|---|---|
| Rodopi: Imeros and the Maroneia coast | Active fire | A fire in low vegetation at Imeros on 12 August brought a 112 message telling two settlements to move towards Maroneia. |
| Kassandra: Siviri and Fourka | Active fire | A fire that started in low scrub near Siviri on the afternoon of 13 August reached the sea and brought 112 messages to leave Siviri and Fourka. |
34 satellite fire detections inside Halkidiki & Northern Greece in the latest NASA FIRMS pass (2026-08-15 to 2026-08-16). A detection is heat seen from orbit; it is not by itself a reported fire, and not every detection becomes one.
What this map area actually covers
The box drawn for this page runs from roughly 21 degrees east to 26.6 degrees east, and from 39.5 degrees north to 41.6 degrees north, wider than any single Greek administrative region. The middle of it, holding Thessaloniki, Halkidiki and the Pieria coast under Olympus, belongs to the Region of Central Macedonia. East past Kavala to Thassos, Xanthi and Rodopi you are in the Region of East Macedonia and Thrace, a different authority publishing different bulletins, and the western and southern edges clip ground that answers to West Macedonia and to Thessaly.
The one body that speaks for all of it is the Hellenic Fire Service, which is why it appears on every page in this group. If a detection sits near the edge of the box, the regional announcement you are looking for may be coming from an authority not named here, and the sensible move is to work outward from the fire service first.
Farm ground and forest look the same from orbit
Northern Greece is not one landscape and its fires are not one kind of event. West of Thessaloniki the Axios, Loudias and Aliakmonas rivers come down together into the Thermaic Gulf across flat, heavily worked ground; rice has been grown around Chalastra since a trial planting in 1949 was made to improve the saline delta soils, and the area became the largest rice-producing district in the country. North east of the city, Lakes Koronia and Volvi sit in the Mygdonia basin fringed with reedbed and ringed by arable land.
That matters because a heat signature over a field edge and one over a pine slope look identical here. What separates them is where they fall and how they behave. Detections strung along the plain, appearing and vanishing over a day, are usually ground being worked; detections on a wooded slope that grow, spread downwind and return on the next satellite pass are the ones to take seriously. Greek law bans outdoor burning in and near forest and farmland from 1 May to 31 October, which narrows the innocent explanations without eliminating them.
How the worst fires here have started
Two of the region's defining fires began the same way. On 21 August 2006 the tail of an eastward-moving cold front ended a heatwave over the southern Balkans, throwing up a line of thunderstorms and windstorms across northern Greece, and lightning from that line set the pine alight on the Kassandra peninsula. Drought and strong wind carried the fire for three days; it cost two lives and destroyed hotels and resort buildings. On the morning of 10 September 2016 four separate fires started on Thassos after intense electrical storms brought no rain behind them, burned into a third day and forced village evacuations.
The lesson is not that storms are dangerous in the abstract. It is that the day a heatwave breaks is often the day fires start here, and that a forecast showing rain arriving does not mean the risk has passed. Dry lightning into ground that has been baking for a week is the specific hazard.
Who tells you, and how quickly
Greece's Ministry of Climate Crisis and Civil Protection publishes a fire risk forecast map each afternoon for the following day, rating each region from category 1, low, up to category 5, the state of alert. Category 4 and above is taken seriously by locals and should be by you: it changes what the fire service pre-positions and what the regions and municipalities are told to prepare for. When a fire is running, evacuation and shelter instructions reach phones in the affected area as 112 messages, sent in Greek and English. The fire service number is 199. Status on this site is set from what those bodies publish, never from satellite heat alone, which is why a page can show detections and carry no warning, or carry a warning over a quiet map.
Islands and areas within northern Greece
Where this comes from
Fire locations are NASA FIRMS satellite detections. Status for each area is set from what the named authority has published, never from satellite data alone — see how this site works.
- Περιφέρεια Κεντρικής Μακεδονίας (Region of Central Macedonia)
- Πυροσβεστικό Σώμα (Hellenic Fire Service)
If you are travelling
Conditions change hourly during a fire. The authorities above are always right where this page and they disagree, and in danger anywhere in the European Union the emergency number is 112.
Most serious status in northern Greece right now: Active fire.