In the village of Lefkimi, a father wraps his arm around his teenage son, muttering soothing words.

The community has been instructed to leave for safety, but many have refused.

A woman waters her flowers with her back to the approaching flames.

“Biblical”, “apocalyptic” and “unimaginable” are the words Greeks have used to describe what is unfolding in Evros region.

It began on 19 August, raged fiercely for more than two weeks, and has become the largest-ever recorded wildfire in Europe.

Here, there is anger and questions about the causes, the response and the way forward - but beyond Greece there are stark warnings that these forest fires will only get bigger and more frequent.

At the side of a dirt road snaking through Dadia forest is a scorched sign that reads: “The forest is valuable. Protect it.”

Around it, the earth smoulders and blackened trees stand emaciated, stripped of their leaves.

The smoke clings to your clothes and sticks in your throat. There are few obvious signs of life in areas hit by fire, beyond the occasional insect struggling through the ashes, or the sound of a bird chirping. 

As new blazes break out - spurred by fast and changing winds - swallows appear, darting through the smoke. Planes and helicopters overhead drop water on the landscape, creating a mist over orange flames.

At ground level firefighters from Greece and across the European Union head in rows towards burning trees, as trucks trail behind.

Sometimes, when fires are put out, diggers are brought in to fell trees, removing anything that could catch alight again. 

Every firefighter I speak to says this is the most difficult wildfire they have dealt with.

“It’s a megafire,” says one. 

They find it hard to keep up with the many fronts that emerge as the flames are whipped up by wind and race through dense vegetation. Things are particularly bad at night when there is no aerial support.

Many here are volunteers. In a clearing, we meet a band of men from the port city of Thessaloniki, a four-hour drive away.

“The terrain is so ugly, so angry, so difficult,” says 53-year-old Stelios Vairlis, an experienced volunteer firefighter driven by his “love for nature and love for my kids”.

He was based here during his military service in the 1980s and describes the forest as a “jewel” of Greece.

“It is, it was a very beautiful forest,” he says, stumbling over his words before heading back into the trees.

Janez Lenarcic says that climate change is accelerating the spread, duration and intensity of wildfires across the continent. 

In Evros too, there is widespread concern that the hot, dry summer has helped to fuel the blaze. Several here speak of praying for rain.

For the European commissioner, this fire has shown how much harder it has become to contain such outbreaks - and that they “increasingly propagate and reach the interface between wild land and urban areas”.

In the first few days of the Evros fire, the flames approached Alexandroupolis, forcing its main hospital to move its patients to a ferry docked at the port. Residents of nearby communities streamed into the city to escape.

Villagers in Kirki, to the north-west, were taken to safety by bus as the flames drew near in late August.

Driving there now, you pass acres of blackened landscape, where trees stand skeletal in a carpet of ash.

“It came from very far away but in one night it burned everything,” says 81-year-old Michalis, who has lived in the village his whole life.

Returning the next day he found his home unscathed but others wept on seeing their houses destroyed.

“It’s the same for all of us. We are all locals. My heart is burning,” he says.

Michalis motions out to the burnt hillscape around him. He recalls childhood days of playing in the forest.

The community has shrunk as he has aged but he hopes the woodland will bring similar memories to people in the future.

“The new generation will live to see this forest again. But I am too old. The damage is done.”

On the outskirts of Alexandroupolis, Vasilis Adamidis, 28, looks helplessly around a burnt olive grove that has been passed through generations of his family.

He and his brother took their first steps in the grove, and his grandfather grew up with the trees, after helping to plant them as a young child.

“He used to talk to them. He could sense what the tree needs,” Vasilis says.

He is not yet sure how many of the family’s 3,000 olive trees have survived in some form, but walking around the grove the devastation is obvious.

When the fire approached, Vasilis rang the fire service to be told no-one could help. The flames were soon upon them and it was clear trying to tackle them alone would be fatal.

“A huge part of our lives is the olive grove so when it started burning, a piece of us started burning too,” he tells me with tears in his eyes. 

“It only needed one night. Nothing more. And all this life, all this effort is gone,” he says.

Vasilis’s products - including luxury olive oil - have been sold throughout Europe and he talks with equal passion about growing both the business and the olives.

Much of the machinery melted in the fire, and Vasilis estimates it will take at least 10 years to return to “good production”, but it will never be what it once was.

He says the destruction wrought in Evros should be a lesson for people around Europe and the world. 

“It could happen to anyone,” he says, as he strokes his dog Rocco, who got lost in the blaze and was found, days later, miles away from the olive grove with singed fur and raw skin around his eyes and nose.

Such catastrophes have far greater significance than the local communities they affect, he believes.

“People should know from a young age that the products you eat - the vegetables, the fruit, the meat - don’t come from the fridge. It comes from nature. From places like this. It matters to all of us,” he says.

Vasilis’s grandfather is now in his 90s. His family have not told him the grove he helped to plant has gone. “It would be the last words he would hear.”