Detail

The ruins of the village of Kallio emerge from the artificial Lake Mornos, a reservoir in Greece, caused by record-high temperatures and prolonged drought in the region. The village was submerged in the late 1970s when a dam was built to create a reservoir 200 kilometers west of Athens.

About 80 houses in the town, along with a church and a school, were abandoned to make way for the reservoir. Today it supplies water to nearly half of Greece’s population. But last winter was the warmest in the country’s history, and now, a month after the warmest July, the lake level has fallen so low that the village is floating.

Mornos Lake level dropped by 40 meters
– said Yorgos Yosifidis, one of the former residents of the town.

Kallio was last seen during the drought of the early 1990s.

Dimitris Giannopoulos, the mayor of the neighbouring municipality of Dorida, says the water is receding more and more each day. This has not been seen here for decades.

According to the Greek Environment Ministry, water reserves in Lake Mornos and three other reservoirs in the region have almost halved to 700 million cubic metres last month from 1.2 billion cubic metres in 2022. The Global Drought Observatory report said 2022 was not the worst drought in Europe in 500 years.

The Global Drought Observatory released its July drought report in Europe, noting that soil moisture in Greece was depleted and vegetation was under pressure. Similar conditions were recorded in other parts of Central Europe, including Italy, Romania, the Balkans and Turkey. The Acropolis archaeological complex in Athens was closed for several hours in July to prevent visitors from being exposed to high temperatures.