Severe Drought in Greece Reveals Sunken Village Near Athens

The ruins of the village of Kallio are resurfacing from the artificial Lake Mornos, a reservoir in Greece, due to record-breaking temperatures and an extended drought in the region.

The village was submerged in the late 1970s when a dam was built to create a reservoir 124 miles (200 kilometers) west of Athens. Nearly 80 homes in the town, as well as its church and school, were abandoned to make room for the reservoir. According to Reuters, the reservoir supplies water to nearly half of the Greek population.

Last winter was Greece’s warmest on record, and now, a month after the hottest July on record, the lake level has dropped to the point that the village has resurfaced.

“The level of Lake Mornos has dropped by 40 meters (131 feet),” Yorgos Iosifidis, a former resident of the town, told the AP. Kallio also reappeared in a drought in the early 1990s, the AP reported. Surreal images of the lake, taken in recent days, are a reminder of the fragility of Earth’s climate.

In shots of the lake, one can see the “bathtub ring” that shows the previously submerged land and waterline of the lake. The situation could worsen before it improves, as dry conditions also provide conditions for wildfires.

According to Greece’s environment ministry, water reserves in Lake Mornos and three other reservoirs in the region have nearly halved, from 1.2 billion cubic meters (42.4 billion cubic feet) in 2022 down to 700 million cubic meters (24.7 billion cubic feet) last month. And that’s not to mention that 2022 was Europe’s worst drought in 500 years, according to a report by the Global Drought Observatory.

The Global Drought Observatory released a July report on drought in Europe that found soil moisture was down in Greece and vegetation was stressed; the same conditions were reported in other parts of central Europe including Italy, Romania, the Balkans, and Türkiye. The Acropolis archaeological site in Athens was closed for hours in July to prevent visitors’ exposure to high temperatures.

Severe droughts have also hit stateside in the last couple of years. In July, a dam failure in New Mexico forced the city of Albuquerque to rely on groundwater, in a reminder that today’s conveniences are often reliant on aging infrastructure.

Of course, a starker reminder of the fragility of our world is the reappearance of an entire village, put to the sword decades beforehand in the name of water accessibility.