Greek firefighters struggled on Friday to contain scores of blazes stretching nationwide, which is the largest fires in the European Union this year.

This was revealed by the fire department spokesman Yiannis Artopios while briefing reporters on Friday, stressing that the biggest fire front was in the Evros region close to the Turkish border, near the northern port city of Alexandroupoli, where a mega blaze that erupted on Saturday raged untamed.

"Unfortunately Evros is the most active part of all the fronts we are facing at the moment and perhaps the most difficult section that we will face today,"

The fire was consuming the Dadia forest, one of the major areas in Europe for birds of prey, as European Union revealed that the Alexandroupoli wildfires are now the largest in the EU on record for 2023 and the second largest since 2000.

Meanwhile, authorities blamed arsonists for the multiple fronts that have emerged simultaneously in the country during the past few days, as Artopios noted that investigations into the arsons involved the national intelligence service and the fire prevention department.

Access24 reports that according to estimates from the National Observatory of Forest Fires, the fires had scorched more than 120,000 hectares (nearly 30,000 acres) of land across Greece in 2023, stressing that this year's burned land area was three times larger than the average annually since 2006.