Once, on my first ever trip to Greece, my husband and I took what we thought was going to be a short walk around the island of Hydra, only to end up on a 13-mile hike through a seared, shadeless expanse of scrubby hills, completely lost. It was 96 degrees, and the final two thirds of the hike—after it had become plain that the “towns” we’d seen on the map were just sun-bleached ruins, and it was too late to turn back—offered not a single scrap of shade. We had just two tiny bottles of water between us.

This wasn’t how the day was supposed to go. We’d arrived in Greece in the middle of a merciless heat wave, and, after a few days, had opted to defect to Hydra from Athens because we couldn’t bear the city’s swelter and clog. Sleep had been hard to come by on account of the jetlag and our feverishly hot rented apartment; opening windows brought little relief, and along with it mosquitos and the neighborhood’s clamor of all-night partying four stories below. We’d been in search of the fabled ease of Hydra—a place where people hauled goods and water with donkeys instead of cars, replete with a horseshoe harbor, lovely cafes, and so many beaches in which to bob in the sea.

The trip was an important one for me, because I had always dreamed of visiting Greece. It was constantly pitched to me, a third-generation Greek-American, as a personal homeland. Here, finally, I was. I’d come to research the migration crisis—the real crisis that resulted in a humanitarian strangulation of refugees, not the manufactured one of their arrival and how it threatened the nativist vision of both Greece and Europe at large. But I was also researching my family’s Greek origins from the Ellis Island generation some 100 years prior, and grappling with the asymmetry with which we humans—within families, neighborhoods, nation-states, newspapers, and within our own souls—narrate stories of our migration.

And now, I was grappling with the unholy heat. On that hike, the path kept appearing and disappearing, leading us astray. Though we could see the port town of Hydra down below, miles away, and the boats and bathers on beaches nearby, we could never figure out how to reach them. How was it possible to slip so quickly from paradise into a sweltering hellscape of no exit? As we searched for the path I became so dehydrated that my legs wobbled, and I involuntarily peed my pants. I hallucinated patches of shade and sat in them, unaware I was fully bared beneath the sun. Each time I stopped, horseflies bit up my brush-scraped legs and feasted on the patches of blood. Knuckle-sized spiders began to appear on webbing spun across the pathway, crawling up my face and arms. Or was this, too, hallucination? I had begun to see an elaborate pantheon of gods and beasts.

Greece is a place plump with mythology—or rather, because of the nature of the cannon, Greece’s landscape is plump with a mythology known and legible to many of us who venture there, whether we trace roots there or not. Myths teach us something about the business of living, of staying alive. What was this mythic landscape revealing to me?

The future, I think. Many of us travel to Greece to study the past. But when it comes to our climate reality, Greece—which is heating up faster than most other places in the global north—is an oracle, helping us see, in terms both stark and enigmatic, what the future holds.

Eventually, we made it back to the harbor. No big thing. But this experience has continued to trouble me. It wasn’t just a foolish misadventure with a happy ending. My hike story reveals something about life in our era of climate emergency. We need only scratch the surface of a place (Google Hydra, behold its stunning beaches, and you’ll see what I mean), deviate only slightly off the well-trodden sections of the map, to reveal a precariousness, a peril—in the place itself, and in us humans trying to live upon it. How quickly a state of careless ease becomes one of mortal peril. Enter the future.

*

“Oh, everyone here knows never to go hiking after April,” a journalist acquaintance told me over coffee when I was back on Hydra a few summers later. It’s just a fact: too hot. The summers are for swimming, for sticking closer to town, for Freddo coffees, for afternoons of shade.

My great grandparents probably knew this, too, on their own island in the Cyclades, where walking paths loop from house to house, town to town, monastery to hillside to spring to mountaintop. But then again, Greece is some four degrees hotter now than it was in the pre-industrial era when my great grandparents were born. The country has always experienced summer heatwaves, but now such spikes are not anomalous, but the norm. In the past 20 years alone, the average temperature has risen two degrees, and 2023, 2024, and 2025 have been the hottest years on record.

Right now, as with every summer, part of Greece continues to be paradisal, while other parts have become seething conflagrations of wildfire and parch. In 2021, 125,000 hectares of land burned, cloaking parts of the country in a mask of black smoke. This past June was the third hottest June on record.

Anyone who has been to Greece in the summer knows the quality of the heat I’m talking about here—inescapable and unrelenting, an entity unto itself, so thick it feels as if you could grab a hunk of it and hold it in your hand. How soothing it is to slip into the water, beneath a patch of shade—to disappear the air. Greeks know how to manage the heat (build houses made of whitewashed stone, irrigate the olives during waves of heat, wear linen, hide out during the unholy hot of midday, don’t take moronic hikes during a heat wave in late June) but the heat is mutating in degree and in kind. Tourists—we’re hopeless. We trudge uphill to the Acropolis (that “monument to doomed expectations,” as Delillo once called it) and to the oracle at Delphi, panting, seeking the ancient ruins’ shadows. We take those ill-advised hikes. That day up on the shadeless hilltops of Hydra, I had been mortally afraid of how hot I had gotten, how disoriented. It wasn’t a total overreaction. In 2024, half a dozen tourists died of heat-related deaths.

“Who needs the scorching Med? Readers’ Tips for Cooler European Coastal Holidays” ran a recent Guardian headline. But the heat isn’t, in fact, dissuading people—not yet; the number of tourists visiting Greece in 2024 was higher than ever before, and this year that record is likely to be broken yet again. But the tourism industry, which constitutes some 13% of Greece’s economy, is also under stress as the water table of the Mediterranean basin rapidly depletes. Greece’s government is forced to make difficult decisions about who gets the water as it becomes more and more scarce. The hotels need water for their pools and spas and cooling mid-day showers. The water-stricken islands like Hydra need it shipped in as they work to build more desalination plants. The farmers need it for their olives and tomato and sunflower crops. And the people need water to drink—to live.

The heating up of Greece is, of course, a global trend, but Greece—and southern Europe more broadly––is being hit particularly hard. The temperature of the Mediterranean basin is rising at a rate 20% faster than the rest of Europe, and in Greece, the cost of climate chaos per capita—basically, how much the average person ends up spending to offset, prevent, or recover from climate emergency—is some 10 times higher than any other Mediterranean country. Meanwhile, Greece’s rate of heat-related deaths is 393 per million—the worst of any country in Europe. Heat, once a matter of inconvenience, something to build one’s life around, is now a matter of life and death. And Greece is a disturbing harbinger for what is to come worldwide.

Heat death takes many forms: death by fire, death by asphyxiation, death by hyperthermia, death by drought, death by economic strangulation, even spiritual death from the grief of a landscape dying. As a reporter, my focus on Greece is always on some aspect of migration—the history of migration to and from Greece, the high numbers of people arriving to Europe by way of Greece today, the inhumane treatment they receive once they arrive, the government’s attempt to keep them out or remove them, the way Europe saddled Greece with the unequal responsibility for the migrants’ care. But climate change—the inhuman heat, and its effects—is always a topic impossible to avoid.

Refugees on the island of Lesvos complained mightily of the heat in summertime, when they practically cooked beneath their makeshift tents (the lucky ones managed to save up for fans they plugged into the camp’s dubious and makeshift network of wires). In September of 2020, that island’s camp burst into flames and, most likely as a result of high winds, historically dry temperatures and the cramped, shantytown nature of the camp quarters, spread so fast that within two days practically the entire place was turned to char. Many of the refugees living there had come from places stricken by their own climatic chaos: people leaving Gambia due to the encroaching Sahel, or the unreliable rains of Ethiopia, or the famine in Sudan. After 20 years of reporting on migration I’ve come to learn that practically every migration story is also, in one way or another, and somewhere along the way, also a story of climate change. To migrate, particularly from south to north, is to move through a multitude of ecosystems that are also migrating and mutating as a matter of survival.

It's an old truth about migration: we leave one kind of trouble only to find another. Last January, I was in Greece researching the future of the country’s olive harvest. The short of it: not good. Olives have been cultivated in this region for millennia because they thrive in arid climates—able to sustain themselves within great domes of heat, through long stretches of no rain. But wildfires have devoured hundreds of thousands of Greek olive trees in the past few years, some of them hundreds and even thousands of years old. Climate chaos has strangled the predictability of the harvest. Two years ago, farmers told me there are so few olives on trees that it wasn’t even worth harvesting them for oil. Part of the problem is the summer heat, but it’s the rising winter temperatures that do the most damage. Winter signals a tree into dormancy, which is what allows it to regenerate enough to burst buds in spring. Seasons, now, are just designations of time—not of weather.

*

“In these Classical lands,” wrote Théophile Guatier over 100 years ago, “the past is so alive that it leaves hardly any room for the present to survive.” Greece, the history books often tell us, is where all of “Western Civilization”—that fictitious creature—began. Greece projects an outward story of its own centrality, in part as a bid for continued inclusion and relevance in the European project, one that consistently sidelines and maligns Greece (strapping it with interminable debt after the 2008 financial crash, for instance, and marooning refugees in Greece’s care, rather than the more resourced countries of the North, as they navigate the asylum process.) The invitation as one climbs the Acropolis Hill is to believe in the origin story—to look backward in order to better understand democracy, civilization, the nation-state, oneself. But up on that hillside in Hydra, I came to understand that while Greece is known for its past, the place offers the most insight into what will become of the sea, as the fish rise to the surface in suffocation; at what will become of the trees, the branches bared of olives; the forests, charred black with fire. What will become of us?

Many of us all over the world will, as we always have, be forced to move. And in this dimension, too, Greece speaks more to an increasingly barricaded future than to the more porous, borderless past.

Once, I was reporting from the Evros region of Greece, the borderland with Turkey. It’s a beautiful and brutal mountainous region with lonely little towns, and an abundance of police and immigration trucks scouring the landscape. I studied the map and drove south, toward a green swath on the map where the river border emptied into the Thracian Sea—what turned out to be the Evros Delta National Park. Though few of the signs were in English, I gathered that the place was a sanctuary for birds—geese, pelicans, storks, flamingos. It was flat, and the wetlands stretched for what felt like miles. I was still close to the border (the border is everywhere, as the refrain goes) but felt liberated from its logic. Here, the river ran into the sea. The birds did their skyward work. And—best of all, on this blistering day—there was wind.

I walked through the wetlands on a rickety boardwalk, the occasional plank wobbling underfoot, and out toward an observation tower in the distance. No one else was around—not a soul. I managed to glean from a sign that in a few months, the flamingos would make a waystation here on their journey south to Africa.

I’d spent the past 20 years studying human rights abuses and borders, parsing questions of belonging and exclusion. I’d been in Greece for just two weeks this time, reporting on the fire that had burned down the refugee camp on Lesvos and the six young refugees who, with zero evidence, were arrested for arson. It was July, and it was hot, and the country was studded with fires, more erupting each day. I was weary from it all and, though I would never give up my ceaseless inquiry into borders—not today, not ever—I did need a rest, a waystation, just like the birds. The future…it worried me—what we were doing to the planet, to one another. What might thwart this instinct to barricade and to bunker? What better temporary waystation from that future than this protected place, no people, crowded with birds, so much water. It was a place where you could almost imagine the world intact again, a future full of life. ♦