MAKISTOS, Greece — 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 liter after liter, 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, refusing to 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 them 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, it is because someone has not done his job. And though southern Europe has been hit with drought this year and high winds spread the flames faster than cars could drive, the government of Prime Minister Kostas Karamanlis, heading for elections next month, is facing a crisis over whether it was up to the task of handling the fires.
A very angry Dimopoulos thinks not, though fire officials began on Monday to speak with optimism that, at a minimum, the blazes were spreading less rapidly. With houses toppled and scorched all around his, he strapped his crop sprayer to his back again on Monday and began a lesson on how to put out fires.
"Bring Karamanlis here and I will take him by the hair and show him how I did it!" he roared, squirting a bit of water, now available again, on his wood pile.
The government, seeking to deflect criticism, has blamed arson, reportedly arresting seven people for setting various fires. Adding to conspiracy theories spread by an alarmist Greek news media — including one that the fires were started as a hostile act from abroad — a Greek prosecutor on Monday ordered an investigation into whether those responsible might be prosecuted under the nation's anti-terrorism laws.
Meantime, the nation's fire brigades and army continued to try to get the fires under control, aided by other European firefighters and aircraft, as well as scores of citizen brigades. Most of the blazes were here on the Peloponnesian peninsula, although others burned on Euboea island, north of Athens.
For the first time since the blazes erupted on Friday, some progress was reported: While 44 out-of-control fires were reported on Sunday, the number dropped by 10 on Monday, aided by a second day of calm winds.
The danger had by no means passed. In the village of Grillos, just over a ridge from here on the western peninsula, a couple who own a restaurant watched in tears as flames advanced from three directions while fire trucks spewed water in the flames' path.
"All we need is one of those," said one owner, Iannis Drakopoulos, 72, as a Russian plane carrying an industrial-sized water bucket passed overhead. "If he dropped it here, it would all have been fine."
In Artemida and here in Makistos, the flames were already out, and Monday was instead a day for tallying the damage and preparing to bury the dead.
"What is there to say?" asked Efstathios Alexandropoulos in the hilltop cemetery in Artemida. With a small crew of helpers, he and a brother were laying the concrete blocks for a single crypt to hold his son, Phillipos, 6; a niece, Ioanna, also 6; and his mother, also named Ioanna.
Up the hill, workers were preparing the grave for Athanasia Karta-Paraskevopoulou, a 35-year-old teacher, and the four children she shielded as the flames surrounded them: Angeliki, 15; Maria, 12; Anastassia, about 10; and Constantinos, 5. They had been on vacation from Athens.
"Before you could say 'fire,' it was here," Vassiliki Bammi, 62, a resident of Artemida, said in the town's toppled town square, who was in the town when the fire came.
All the descriptions from people who saw it were the same: flames moving at an unimaginable rate and no one apart from the police to help.
The fire reportedly came over a ridge first to Makistos, a village of 60 homes. Antonios Kokkaliaris, 80, a farmer, said he had been reading his paper, underlining parts he liked, when he heard the bell in St. John's church ring.
"I went out and I saw the flames before me and people running," he said. He could not leave, he said, because his wife, Koula, 82, is severely disabled. "I told her, 'Stay put, we're going to fight this out.' I grabbed onto the hose and I started dousing left, right and center."
The town emptied, with only him, a herdsman and Mr. Dimopoulos with his wine staying behind. Mr. Kokkaliaris managed to douse his home, and two next door, well enough that the fires howled past, leaving his house intact.
But when it was over, he did not feel relief.
"I was disappointed, honestly," he said, "because not only was there no one to help me, there was no one in sight. 'Am I just standing here alone? What happened to all my townspeople? What is the purpose of life if I am all alone?"'
The fire quickly ripped into Artemida, about two miles away. Residents piled into cars down the road toward Zaharo, the area's main town, on the Aegean Sea.
They never made it; fire had swept across the road, blocking it. In the smoke and confusion, there was an accident between the cars and a fire truck, which was found rolled over. Townspeople said that everyone in the convoy then fled into the olive grove, where they died.
Now the once-lovely hills are burnt to white ash, with olive trees like blackened skeletons planted after death. All but 14 of the 60 homes here were seriously damaged or destroyed completely; in Artemida, 17 of the 70 houses were lost (but Karta-Paraskevopoulou's house was intact).
The region normally produces 10,000 tons of oil, but nearly all the olive trees are now destroyed, along with countless livelihoods. Charred donkeys and chickens litter ruined farms.
"This village is literally wiped out," Bammi said. "It's not just those who have been killed. Those who are left have no fields to work in, no olive trees. They have nothing to look forward to."
In late afternoon, Mr. Dimopoulos' wife, Maria, 56, laid down white daisies on the spot where her cousins, Nikos and Maria Dimopoulos, the unmarried brother and sister, both in their 70s, died. The three of them had been fleeing the fire together when a police officer stopped and urged them to get into his car. Ms. Dimopoulos did, but her cousins did not want to leave their donkey, their only possession of value.
"I told you, 'Come with me!"' she said, laying the flowers down next to the dead donkey on the side of the road. "You wouldn't come. Why wouldn't you come?"