It began with two fires and a furious wind. Just after one o'clock, a blaze broke out west of Athens near Kineta. Hours later a second ignited to the north, near Penteli, and the gusts that day reached 124 km per hour, a force 12 on the Beaufort scale. The Penteli fire raced east toward the coast, tearing through Neos Voutzas, Mati, and Kokkino Limanaki, just north of the port of Rafina. Investigators later concluded the deadly fire most likely started from wood being burned in a garden in the Daou area; a 65-year-old local man was eventually charged. A home security camera caught the moment a small fire took hold in a clearing at 4:41 in the afternoon. The wind did the rest.

Mati's geography became a trap. The resort's streets were narrow and tangled, many of them informal constructions built without permits, and as the fire arrived they choked with cars trying to flee. The flames, fanned to temperatures around 800 degrees Celsius, overran houses and vehicles within metres of the shore. Roughly 400 people waded out into the water and waited there for hours to be rescued. Boats pulled survivors from the beaches and the open sea and recovered the bodies of those who had not made it; two people drowned when a vessel rescuing them from a hotel capsized. Elsewhere, an entire summer camp of 620 children was evacuated overnight, a piece of the day that ended in survival rather than grief.

Greece stopped. Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras declared a state of emergency in Attica. Flags above the Acropolis and the Greek parliament were lowered to half mast, and the European flags outside the Commission in Brussels followed. Aid offers arrived from across the world, and the EU Civil Protection Mechanism mobilised water-bombing aircraft, fire engines, and crews from member states, while the Copernicus satellite system mapped the burned coastline. Within the country, the response was intimate as much as institutional: businesses handed out food and water, donation drives sprang up overnight, and ordinary citizens opened their homes to people who had lost everything in an afternoon.

The grief soon turned to anger. A March 2019 report described "chaos and a collapse of the system," with mismanagement and a lack of coordination among police and fire services. The Prime Minister promised a rebuilt "model town" within a year; a year later the land still lay scorched, and survivors had received compensation of as little as 6,000 euros amid bureaucratic delays. In April 2024, five former firefighting and disaster-response officials were convicted of criminal negligence and sentenced to terms of up to 111 years, but the court capped servable time at five years and allowed fines in lieu of prison, releasing them. For many families of the 104, justice felt as incomplete as the rebuilding. Mati endures as a place of mourning, and as a warning about what fire and wind can do to a coast in minutes.