Here's an excerpt from a piece at Canada.com which just popped into my mailbox:

Thick black smoke billowed over the well-preserved ruins of Olympia, on the Peloponnese. The blaze crept up a hillside, engulfing surrounding pine and cypress woods.

"With self-sacrifice, firefighters fought 'trench battles' to rescue these sensitive and important sites," Public Order Minister Byron Polydoras told reporters.

Fire scorched the yard of the museum at Olympia, housing famous classical sculptures such as Praxiteles' Hermes, but planes, helicopters and scores of firefighters beat it back.

Some 60 firefighters and six trucks remained at the site to battle any flare-up, the fire brigade said.

Ancient Olympia, which hosted the Olympics for centuries from 776 BC, holds an Olympic flame ceremony every two years and is among the most popular tourist sites in the country.

"Here it is, the contrast: ancient Greece gave the world civilization and modern Greece gives it destruction," a resident of ancient Olympia told Alter TV station.

Towering walls of flame have cut a swathe of destruction through the southern Peloponnese and the island of Evia near the capital and swept across other regions, prompting Greece to declare a nationwide state of emergency on Saturday.

"The destruction is of biblical proportions," Nicholas Orphanos, a volunteer firefighter in the Peloponnese, told reporters. "There are villages we want to go to and we cannot because the roads are blocked. In 30 years, I have never seen such destruction."

The fires have covered Athens in thick white ash that swirled round the temples on the Acropolis, and the smell of smoke permeated the city.