Türkiye's forestry crews went to 169 fires in the space of a day. By Thursday evening 163 of them were out, and six were still burning across five provinces.
The latest. Agriculture and Forestry Minister İbrahim Yumaklı gave the count on 30 July 2026, covering everything since the previous day. He said 110 of the 169 started outside forest land. The fires at Kaş in Antalya and Eğirdir in Isparta are fully contained. Of the six still going, Mersin's Gülnar and Muğla's Seydikemer are "largely under control" and the fires at Alanya and Fethiye have had their "energy reduced," in his words, while crews are still working hard at Aydın's Çine and Balıkesir's Gömeç. The Fethiye fire is a new one, at Yeşilüzümlü, and not the fire that went through Gökçeovacık and İnlice in the same district last week.
The one that crossed a border
The Gömeç fire started around midday on Wednesday, got away from the crews on the wind, and left Balıkesir altogether.
It reached the Kozak plateau in İzmir's Bergama district, known for its stone pines and the nuts they produce. Flames moved into the Demircidere and Okçular neighborhoods.
People who live there joined in. Villages put the fire tankers handed out to their headmen earlier to use, working next to municipal water tankers sent up from İzmir.
Crossing the line changed who was fighting it. İzmir's metropolitan fire service and the İzmir regional forestry directorate took up a fire that had started as Balıkesir's, with helicopters and planes overhead.
What emptying a district looks like
The evacuations this week have been large and they have been spread out.
At Edremit in Balıkesir, where fire went through forest and olive groves at Altınoluk, 210 homes and about 650 people were moved out. In Ayvalık, the whole of Tıfıllar Mahallesi was cleared as a precaution. At Alanya, the district governor Şakir Öner Öztürk said 45 houses were emptied.
At Seydikemer in Muğla on Wednesday, 202 people from 121 homes left, along with 45 patients from the state hospital and 50 farm animals.
Öztürk said no house at Alanya was damaged and nobody was hurt. He put the response there at two planes, two helicopters, 93 vehicles, 130 teams and 325 people, and said he expected the fire under control on Thursday if the weather held.
Gömeç and Edremit together drew six planes, five helicopters, 30 fire tenders, 16 municipal fire vehicles and 658 people.
The bill where the fires are already out
Containment is not the end of the accounting.
At Kumluca in Antalya, the fire that started at Yazır on Wednesday was held overnight by 281 people with two planes, four helicopters, 15 tenders and 30 fire vehicles. The district governor, Bahadır Güneş, said it took 50 hectares (124 acres) and damaged about 15 households, and that survey work would continue.
That is one fire out of 169, and it is one of the ones that went well.
Nobody has said why
The cause is undetermined at Seydikemer, at Fethiye's Yeşilüzümlü, at Alanya's Sapadere, at Çine and at Edremit. The jandarma opened files on two other fires in the Kumluca district on Wednesday.
The single exception is Dikili in İzmir, where a maquis fire near a housing development at Çandarlı was claimed to have started when a transformer blew. That account has not been confirmed.
Yumaklı had warned on 28 July that winds of up to 80 km/h (50 mph) were coming to many provinces this week, and that wind is the thing that takes a fire past the point where crews can hold it. Two days later he was counting 169 of them.
"Forest heroes are fighting for the Green Homeland," he wrote on Thursday. "Don't you go causing new fires."