Emerging Ruins: Drought Unveils Submerged Greek Village

After 45 years underwater, the village of Kallio is reemerging due to severe drought. The shrinking Lake Mornos has left the region, which supplies water to half of Greece, at its lowest levels in decades. With climate change exacerbating extreme weather, the future remains uncertain for the area.

From beneath the shrinking Lake Mornos in central Greece, the muddied remains of homes are reemerging nearly 45 years since the village that once stood here disappeared underwater. Following a winter with minimal snow, a summer of intense heatwaves, and a prolonged drought, the massive man-made lake, supplying water to nearly half of Greece's population, has dwindled to its lowest level in decades.

'Day by day, the water goes down,' said Dimitris Giannopoulos, mayor of the broader Dorida municipality, noting that nothing similar had been seen for 33 years. Long stretches of cracked soil surround the ruins of the lost village of Kallio, which was flooded in 1980 to meet the increasing water demands of the capital, approximately 200 km away. Bricks lie among mounds of seashells.

Greece's arid Mediterranean climate has made it particularly susceptible to the effects of global warming, exacerbating summer wildfires that last month reached the outskirts of Athens. Scientists attribute the lake's decline to extreme weather linked to climate change. 'It is an alarm bell,' said Efthymis Lekkas, professor of disaster management at the University of Athens.

'We don't know what will happen in the coming period. If we have a rainless winter, things will get difficult.' Giannopoulos gestures towards Mount Giona, which once used to have a snow-capped peak but saw none last winter, Greece's warmest on record. On the lake's receding rim, trees have taken on a yellowish hue due to the lack of water, an unprecedented phenomenon.

'This has never happened before,' he said. Wells in the area are drying up, and surrounding villages, not reliant on lake water, experienced water cuts this summer. A local firefighter chief has warned that the risk of wildfires looms as the forests become drier.

Satellite images from Greece's National Observatory reveal that the lake's surface area declined from approximately 16.8 square km in August 2022 to just 12.0 square km this year. Water reserves in Lake Mornos and three other reservoirs supplying Attica—a region encompassing Athens and home to around 4 million people—dropped to 700 million cubic meters in August, down from 1.2 billion cubic meters in 2022, according to the environment ministry.

The state-run Athens water company EYDAP has begun supplementing its network with additional sources of water. Former residents of Kallio were surprised but saddened to see their village emerge again. 'I used to see it full and say it was a beach. Now all you see is dryness,' said 90-year-old Konstantinos Gerodimos. His 77-year-old wife Maria added, 'If it continues like this, the entire village will appear, all the way to the bottom, where the church and our home was.'

(With inputs from agencies.)