The extreme heat wave around the Mediterranean continues, as do the countries' fight against huge forest fires.

In the Greek capital Athens, thousands of residents have been forced to leave their homes and watch from a distance how the fires got further into the northern parts of the city.

Kostas is one of them:

- This area is a little better.

The smoke and pollution down there is much worse which made me suffocate.

I could barely breathe, he says.

Christos Sfetsas lives in Varibobi, a suburb of Athens.

He notes that the devastation is great. 

- What you see here happened in half an hour.

There is enormous damage, houses have burned, entire fortunes have burned.

"We left home and pets"

On the country's second largest island Evia, lifeboats have picked up around 85 people since the fires destroyed the surrounding pine forests and filled the sky with thick smoke, reports Reuters.

- It burned all night.

The forest has been destroyed, the villages burned.

We left our homes behind us, we left our pets, says local resident Christina Katsini to Skai TV.

The fires have also reached the village of Olympia, which is located next to the ancient excavation area.

Olympia, in the western Peloponnese, is on the UN World Heritage List and houses the stadium and the temples where the Olympic Games were held in ancient times and where the Olympic flame is lit every two years.

Several villages in the region have now been evacuated and around 160 firefighters have fought to save the old treasures, reports Reuters.

- We do our best to save this sacred place, says the local mayor Panagiotis Antonakopoulos in a TV interview,

- After human life, our priority is to save our history.

Several dead in Turkey

Fires are also raging in more places in Europe.

The situation in Turkey remains difficult in the country, where the forest fires that have now raged for over a week are described as the worst in several generations.

So far, eight people and thousands of animals have died and thousands of people have been evacuated.

Huge areas of lush greenery have been transformed into ash and black, bare tree trunks.

It was thought to have secured the Kemerkoy power plant in Milas in southwestern Turkey - but on Wednesday night, Mayor Muhammet Tokat tweeted that the flames had entered the facility itself and that it was evacuated.

Also in Bulgaria, land and forest fires are raging and two forest workers have died and several houses have burned down. The number of fires has doubled to 200-240 a day in the past week, says rescue leader Nikola Nikolov for the state television channel BNT. The country has gone through a longer heat wave with temperatures of up to 40 degrees.