Europe Broils In Heat Wave That Fuels Fires In France, Spain

LA TESTE-DE-BUCH, France (AP) — A heat wave broiling Europe spilled northward Monday to Britain, where authorities warned of possible record temperatures, and fueled ferocious wildfires in France, which scrambled water-bombing planes and hundreds of firefighters to battle flames spreading through tinder-dry forests.

In Spain, two people were killed in blazes that the country’s prime minister linked to global warming, saying: “Climate change kills.”

In both France and Spain, fierce heat fueled the fires — part of a wall of high temperatures moving across Europe, touching even places like Britain, where officials have issued the first-ever extreme heat warning. The country’s weather service forecast that the record high of 38.7 degrees Celsius (101.7 degrees Fahrenheit), set in 2019, could be shattered.

“Forty-one isn’t off the cards,” said Met Office CEO Penelope Endersby. “We’ve even got some 43s in the model, but we’re hoping it won’t be as high as that.”

French forecasters also warned of possible record temperatures as swirling hot winds complicated firefighting efforts in the country’s southwest.

Authorities there started evacuating more towns, moving out another 3,500 people at risk of finding themselves in the path of the raging flames that have already seared 140 square kilometers (54 square miles) of pine forests and other vegetation. That will take the number who have been forced out of their homes in the Gironde region to around 20,000 since the wildfires began July 12.

The regional fire service chief, Marc Vermeulen, described the burning forests as “a powder keg” and said tree trunks were shattering as flames consumed them, sending burning embers into the air and further spreading the blazes.

“The fire is literally exploding,” he said. “We’re facing extreme and exceptional circumstances.”

Three additional planes were sent to join six others already fighting the fires, scooping up seawater into their tanks and making repeated runs through dense clouds of smoke, the Interior Ministry said Sunday night.

More than 200 reinforcements headed to join the 1,500-strong force of firefighters battling night and day to contain the blazes in the Gironde, where flames neared prized vineyards and the Arcachon maritime basin famed for its oysters and beaches.

Spain, meanwhile, reported a second fatality in two days as it battled its own blazes. The body of a 69-year-old sheep farmer was found Monday in the same hilly area where a 62-year-old firefighter died a day earlier when he was trapped by flames in the northwestern Zamora province. More than 30 forest fires around Spain have forced the evacuation of thousands of people and blackened 220 square kilometers (85 square miles) of forest and scrub.

Heat waves and drought tied to climate change have made wildfires harder to fight. Scientists say climate change will continue to make weather more extreme and wildfires more frequent and destructive.

“Climate change kills,” Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez said Monday during a visit to the Extremadura region, where firefighters tackled three major blazes. “It kills people, it kills our ecosystems and biodiversity.”

Teresa Ribera, Spain’s minister for ecological transition, described her country as “literally under fire” as she attended talks on climate change in Berlin.

She warned of “terrifying prospects still for the days to come” — after more than 10 days of temperatures over 40 C (104 F), cooling only moderately at night.

According to Spain’s Carlos III Institute, which records daily temperature-related fatalities, 237 deaths were attributed to high temperatures from July 10 to 14. That was compared to 25 heat-related deaths the previous week.

The heat wave in Spain is forecast to ease on Tuesday, but the respite will be brief as temperatures rise again on Wednesday, especially in the dry western Extremadura region.

In Portugal, much cooler weather Monday helped fire crews make progress against blazes. More than 600 firefighters attended four major fires in northern Portugal.

Renaissance Synagogues Being Restored In Venice’s Ghetto

Venice’s Jewish ghetto is considered the first in Europe and one of the first in the world, and a new effort is underway to preserve its 16th-century synagogues for the Jews who have remained and tourists who pass through.

For nearly two years, restorers have been peeling away paint and discovering the original foundations of three of the ghetto’s synagogues, which are considered the only Renaissance synagogues still in use, art historian David Landau said.

Landau is spearheading the fundraising effort to restore the synagogues and nearby buildings both for Venice’s small Jewish community, which numbers around 450 people, and for tourists who can visit them on a guided tour through the Jewish Museum of Venice.

“I was really deeply offended by the state of the synagogues,” said Landau, a Renaissance specialist who bought a home in Venice 12 years ago. “I felt that the synagogues were in very bad condition. They had been altered beyond recognition over the centuries, and needed to be kind of cared for and loved.”

He has secured about 5 million euros to date and expects workers can complete the restoration process by the end of 2023 if the rest of the funding comes through, although the original outstanding 4 million euros has now ballooned to 6 million euros because of soaring building costs.

Venice’s ghetto dates from 1516, when the republic forced the growing numbers of Jews into the district where the old foundries, or “geti” as they were known, had been located. The area, which was locked down at night, became what is considered Europe’s first ghetto and remains the hub of Venice’s Jewish community in the Cannaregio area.

The first synagogue dates from 1528 and was built by German Ashkenazi Jews. Others followed and served different groups, including one for Spanish Sephardic Jews and one for Italian Jews.

None is visible from the street, as strict rules imposed by Venice’s rulers didn’t allow Jews to practice their faith openly. All the synagogues are hidden away on the top floors of seemingly normal buildings that on the lower levels held cramped living spaces for Jewish families.

The synagogues have remained operational continuously, except for the years of World War II during the German occupation.

The head of Venice’s Jewish community, Dario Calimani, said the restoration project was necessary both to maintain the religious and cultural life of Venice’s Jews today and to preserve the community’s history.

“They are a testimony to the life that it was, to the history of our community, small community,” he said.

At Ukraine's Largest Art Gallery, A Race To Protect Heritage

LVIV, Ukraine (AP) — The director of Ukraine’s largest art museum walked its hallways, supervising as staff packed away its collections to protect their national heritage in case the Russian invasion advances west.

In one partially empty gallery of the Andrey Sheptytsky National Museum, employees placed carefully wrapped baroque pieces into cardboard boxes. A few meters away, a group walked down the majestic main staircase carrying a giant piece of sacred art, the 18th century Bohorodchany iconostasis.

“Sometimes the tears are coming because a lot of labor has been put in here. It takes time, energy. You are doing something good, you feel pleased. Today you see empty walls, so it feels bitter, sad. We didn’t believe it till the last minute that this could happen,” museum General Director Ihor Kozhan said Friday.

The doors of the museum in the western city of Lviv have been closed since Russia’s war on Ukraine began on Feb. 24, and heritage sites across the country face danger as the fighting continues. Korzhan said he receives daily calls from other European cultural institutions offering to help as he and his staff race to preserve the museum’s works.

Anna Naurobska, the head of the rare manuscripts and books department, said she still doesn’t know where to safely store the collection of more than 12,000 items being packed into boxes.

The relocation process and the fear that the collection is in danger in the event of an attack on the city overwhelms her.

“This is our story; this is our life. It is very important to us,” Naurobska said.

She walked into another room and held up a massive tome, tears forming in her eyes. “It’s a Russian book,” she said, putting it back on the shelf. “I’m so angry.”

Like the museum, other sites in Lviv are rushing to protect works of artistic or cultural importance. The display cabinets at the Museum of the History of Religion are almost empty. Workers are assembling metal containers in the patio to safely store the remaining items before placing them in basements. At the Latin Cathedral, the sculptures have been covered with cardboard, foam and plastic to protect them from possible shrapnel.

Amid the bare walls and shrouded statues, Kozhan lamented the empty museum, which has survived two world wars.

“Museum has to live. People have to be there, and first of all children. They have to learn the basics of their culture,” he said

Heat Wave Edges Higher In Southern Europe, Fuels Wildfires

ROME (AP) — Intense heat baking Italy pushed northward towards the popular tourist destination of Florence Friday while wildfires charred the country’s south, and Spain appeared headed for an all-time record high temperature as a heat wave kept southern Europe in a fiery hold.

Italy saw temperatures in places upwards of 40 C (104 F), and Rome broiled. By late afternoon Friday, the heat in Florence reached 39 C (102 F). That city and Bologna also were issued alerts for Saturday by the health ministry.

Giancarlo Penza, of the Rome-based Catholic charity Sant’Egidio Community, reminded viewers of state TV that the most vulnerable in such weather are elderly people living alone and the homeless.

“(The latter) are the persons who are invisible, who live on the street,” Penza said. “Knock on the door of an older person” who lives alone, next door, or “stop someone on the street” without a home and ask if they need help, he urged Italians.

Many southern European countries have suffered days of intense heat, accompanied by deadly wildfires in Algeria, Turkey, Italy and Greece.

While the area is known for its sunny, hot summers, scientists voice little doubt that climate change from the burning of coal, oil and natural gas is driving extreme events such as heat waves, droughts and wildfires. Such hardships are likely to happen more frequently as Earth continues to warm, they say.

Wildfire problems will only worsen because of abandonment of rural areas and climate change, the environment minister of Cyprus said. The eastern Mediterranean, where the island nation is located, is a “global climate change hot spot,” where biodiversity and forest ecosystems are “intensely negatively impacted,” Minister Costas Kadis told The AP Friday.

Unworked agricultural land is being overrun by wild growth, making it easy terrain for fires, which are ever “more intense, destructive and frequently occurring” as a result of more frequent and longer heatwaves and droughts, the minister said.

Italian Premier Mario Draghi sent his emergency chief to Calabria in the south, where blazes burning for days in the rugged Aspromonte forest have claimed four lives.

Draghi pledged government aid for those losing property or businesses and an “extraordinary plan of reforestation.”

Wildfires on the Italian island of Sardinia were reported largely contained, but a blaze early Friday near Tivoli in the countryside east of Rome forced the evacuation of 25 families. Tivoli’s 16th-centruy Villa d’Este and the ancient ruins of Hadrian’s Villa are tourist attractions.

Italian firefighters were also battling blazes near Mount Etna, the volcano in Sicily which for months has been belching flames and lava. Authorities said fires erupted in separate locations in the woods, raising suspicions they were caused by people, either deliberately or by accident.

On Greece’s second-largest island of Evia, where devastating blazes in the wake of an exceptional heat wave this summer have been described as the nation’s worst ecological disaster in decades, a fresh fire broke out on Friday.

Spain’s state meteorological agency registered 45 C (113 F) at Granada airport at 3 p.m.

Elsewhere in Spain’s sizzling south, in the city of Malaga, Juan Villodres was doing a brisk trade selling cold drinks from a kiosk. “The heat wave this year is getting more intense, and the last one this strong was in 2019,″ Villodres said.

Spain was bracing for even hotter weather. Temperatures as high as 47 C (116.60 F) are forecast in the south on Saturday. That would break a national record of 46.9 C (116.4 F), set in Cordoba in July 2017.

On Wednesday, the Italian town of Floridia near the city of Syracuse in Sicily reported a temperature reading of 48.8 C (119.8F) .

On Friday, a World Meteorological Organization official said at a briefing in Geneva that it could take a month or two to verify the reading and determine if it’s indeed a record for continental Europe, topping the previous 48 C set in Athens in 1977.

France’s national weather agency warned of temperatures as high as 40 C on Friday and Saturday in the Provence region, near the border with Italy.

Temperatures in Portugal on Saturday and Sunday were forecast to climb into the 40s C. In much of the country, with a significantly increased risk for wildfires, the public has been barred from entering forested areas and is banned from using fireworks or farm machinery that could cause sparks.

In Serbia, the army has deployed water tanks and authorities have appealed to residents to avoid watering gardens. A weeks-long drought is worrying cattle owners, particularly in remote villages in hilly areas.