Sunken Village Emerges As Drought Dries Up The Lake Mornos In Greece

The remains of homes are reappearing from Lake Mornos in Greece, nearly 45 years after the village that was once there was submerged.

Reasons For Lake Shrinkage 

Lake Mornos, which supplies water to nearly half of the Greek population, has fallen to its lowest level in decades due to many reasons including almost no snow in the winter, extreme heat waves in Summer, and little rain leading to months of drought around much of Greece. 

“Day by day, the water goes down,” said Dimitris Giannopoulos, mayor of the broader Dorida municipality,  who said nothing like this situation has been seen for 33 years, reported by NBC News. 

Bricks and seashells are scattered around the area of Kallio. Cracked soil now surrounds the village which was flooded in 1980 to make way for a lake supplying water to the capital, 125 miles away. 

“It is an alarm bell. We don’t know what will happen in the coming period. If we have a rainless winter, things will get difficult,” said Efthymis Lekkas, professor of disaster management at the University of Athens, reported by NBC News.

“The Entire Village Will Appear”

Wildfires erupted and reached the outskirts of Athens,  Greece’s dry Mediterranean climate makes it very vulnerable to global warming and caused worsened summer wildfires. Scientists say that extreme weather from climate change is now causing the lake to shrink.

According to satellite images from Greece’s National Observatory, the lake’s surface area has decreased from about 6.5 square miles in August 2022 to just 4.5 square miles this year, 2024.

“I used to see it full and say it was a beach. Now all you see is dryness,” said 90-year-old Konstantinos Gerodimos, a former resident of Kallio who was shocked to see the village.

“If it continues like this, the entire village will appear, all the way to the bottom, where the church and our home was,” Gerodimos’s wife said. 

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