Halkidiki Wildfire Near Skala Triggers 112 Alert

Tourists staying on Halkidiki these days, a destination where large numbers of guests from Serbia spend their holidays every summer and into early autumn, received an emergency message from Greece’s civil protection service on their phones on Saturday. A wildfire had broken out near the village of Skala, and authorities asked residents and tourists in the area to stay on standby and follow further instructions.

The fire started on Saturday, September 12, around 12:30 pm, in a mixed farmland and forest area near Skala, a settlement in the municipality of Aristotelis on the Halkidiki peninsula. Sources disagree on the exact time the 112 alert went out: b92.net and the Greek outlet enikos.gr report it was sent at 12:51 pm, while the Greek site parallaximag.gr says the warning went out an hour earlier, at 11:51 am. Available sources do not make clear which figure is correct.

Greece’s civil protection service, in the message as translated and carried by B92, stated:

“Civil Protection, 09/12/2026, 12:51 pm. Wildfire in the area of Skala, in the Halkidiki regional unit. Stay on standby and follow the instructions of the competent authorities.”

The message went out to everyone in the wider vicinity of the fire at the time, including tourists who were in that part of the peninsula that day.

According to figures carried by Greek media, 43 firefighters were on the ground from the first moments, along with a foot unit from the Second Special Wildfire Unit, known by its abbreviation 2. EMODE, and 12 vehicles. Two planes and one helicopter assisted from the air. The municipality of Aristotelis also sent its own water tankers to the scene to give firefighting crews extra supplies for putting out the blaze.

Parallaximag.gr reported at 2:39 pm that the situation with the fire had improved. That source makes no mention of any evacuation or of populated areas being directly threatened, and neither of the other two sources mentions such measures either.

Yellow alert issued for several Greek regions on Sunday

For Sunday, September 13, Greece’s Fire Service declared a yellow meteo alert, the third level of wildfire danger, for a number of regions across the country. The list includes, among others, Attica, Kilkis, Mount Athos, the island of Thasos, as well as Lesbos, Chios and Samos. Halkidiki is not on Sunday’s list, but the fire near Skala a day earlier is a reminder of how quickly flames can take hold on parched ground.

Halkidiki is one of the most popular Greek destinations for visitors from Serbia, who rent accommodation along all three legs of the peninsula during the summer and early autumn season, including the area around the municipality of Aristotelis where Skala is located. Greece had a pronounced dry spell this summer, with temperatures in some places topping 42 degrees Celsius, and it is exactly those conditions, combined with wind, that let wildfires spread quickly and become hard to control.

Wildfires hit Greece’s hot, dry landscape every year, and the scale such fires can reach was shown by the 2018 disaster, when 104 people died in the coastal town of Mati, east of Athens, in a fire whipped up by strong winds. Based on the information available so far, the fire near Skala did not come close to that scale, and Greek authorities managed to keep it confined to farmland and forest.

Whether Sunday’s yellow alert will bring new fires to the peninsula is not known from the sources available at this time. Greek firefighting crews continue to monitor the situation near Skala, and tourists in the region are still advised to follow the instructions of civil protection and local authorities.