Levan Fire Near Fier: 15 Serbian Families Evacuated

A wildfire that broke out yesterday around noon near the village of Vadhiza, close to Fier in southern Albania, had by this morning reached the settlement of Levan, home to a significant part of the country’s Serbian national minority. The flames destroyed three houses and a workshop, and police evacuated around fifteen families overnight after their homes came under direct threat. For Belgrade this is not simply news of a natural disaster in a neighboring country: it is a direct threat to a community that has lived in that part of Albania for decades, spread across settlements around Vlore and Fier.

According to a Top Channel correspondent, cited by Telegraf, the fire moved from Vadhiza toward Levan, where it met large areas of olive groves, pine forest and scrubland. Its spread was fueled by strong wind, high temperatures and prolonged drought, a familiar combination for this part of the Balkans in late summer, and overnight the fire front split into several directions. One branch headed toward the settlements of Peshtan and Vogel, while new flashpoints formed elsewhere, further complicating firefighting efforts.

Besides the three homes, a workshop also burned down, and according to Telegraf, so did a warehouse used to produce beehives. The fire also reached a hospitality venue and an unoccupied house near the Koshovica pass, while stables holding livestock remained close to the fire zone, their fate unknown overnight. Local media report that residents tried to stop the flames from reaching some yards themselves, using improvised means, before organized crews arrived on the scene, while fire units from five towns, Fier, Mallakastra, Lushnje, Vlore and Berat, kept arriving through the afternoon and evening.

At one point the flames crossed the main road connecting Fier and Levan, and police temporarily suspended traffic on that stretch because of the dense smoke. According to Albania’s Emergency Situations Agency, the wider operation in Fier involves firefighters, army personnel, municipal staff and two helicopters that tackled the hardest to reach flashpoints from the air, over terrain that ground crews could not cover quickly.

Overnight, according to Albanian media, a clash also broke out between some residents and police, with locals claiming that state assistance had not arrived quickly enough while the fire was closest to their houses. Similar frustration has accompanied other major wildfires in the Balkans during the dry season, when the number of crews deployed in the first hours often lags behind a fire spreading fast under wind.

The Serbian community around Fier and Vlore, concentrated in several villages of which Levan is one of the largest, has not officially reported any casualties or injuries so far, and Albanian authorities had not released such information by this morning either. That does not mean the danger has passed: new flashpoints forming overnight show the fire front remains unstable, and strong wind continues to favor its spread toward Peshtan and Vogel, settlements that have only just entered the risk zone. Fire units from five Albanian towns are continuing the operation today, backed by helicopters and the army, while the final extent of the damage in Levan and the surrounding villages is still being assessed. For Serbia’s community in Albania, this fire is not just a statistic about weather extremes in the south of the continent. It is a disaster with specific names attached: villages, houses and families left without a roof.