After the second world war, Greece’s countryside experienced two debilitating human surges – an exodus of villagers, then a most peculiar human invasion of its fringes. These two surges, aided by a weak state and abetted by the climate crisis, have turned the low-level drama of naturally redemptive forest fires into this summer’s heart-wrenching catastrophe. After heatwaves of unprecedented longevity, wildfires across the summer months have so far destroyed more than 100,000 hectares of ancient pine forests. …To grasp why this is happening, we need to understand the trajectory of urban and rural development in Greece. War and poverty caused a mass exodus from the countryside that began in the late 1940s. …Then, in the 1960s and 1970s, the same people dreamed of a partial return to the countryside… villas and shopping malls gradually invaded inland wooded areas bordering Athens.