When the water ran out, with pine cones popping and the flames still high around his house, George Dimopoulos switched to wine. He made it himself two years ago, and, nearly alone in his village as it all but burned down on Friday night, he poured litre after litre, 200 in all, into his little copper hand-pumped crop sprayer, and sprayed and sprayed. “I had nothing else,” said Dimopoulos, 63.

His wine helped save his life, his house and possibly his neighborhood. But it was an exception in this village and the one next door, Artemida, where the death toll accounts for nearly half the 63 people now reported dead from Greece’s worst fires in more than a century.

Most of the villagers died on the run. An elderly brother and sister, unmarried and living together, fled but would not leave behind their only donkey. A convoy trying to outrace the flames snarled into a crash, surrounded by a fire so hot it liquefied metal and bubbled windshields like grilled cheese. Those in the cars fled up a slope, where rescue workers later found at least 23 bodies in an olive grove scraped raw by flames. Among the dead were four children, their mother’s body wrapped around them.

These are stories Europe is no longer used to hearing about itself, believing that in the developed world, problems like forest fires can be solved and, if not, that it is because someone has not done his job. And though Southern Europe has been hit with drought, and high winds spread the flames faster than cars could drive, the government of Kostas Karamanlis is facing a crisis over whether it was up to the task of handling the fires.