ISTANBUL, Turkey — Europe’s busiest airport
shut down in
Istanbul while schools and vaccination centers closed in Athens as
a rare snowstorm blanketed swathes of the eastern Mediterranean region on
Monday, causing blackouts and traffic havoc.
اضافة اعلان
The closure of
Istanbul Airport — where the roof of
one of the cargo terminals collapsed under the heavy snow, causing no injuries
— grounded flights stretching from the Middle East and Africa to Europe and
Asia.
Travel officials told AFP it marked the gleaming
glass-and-steel structure’s first shutdown since it replaced Istanbul’s old
Ataturk Airport as the new hub for
Turkish Airlines in 2019.
The winter’s first snow created a jovial atmosphere
across the squares of Istanbul’s ancient mosques, where children built snowmen
and tourists posed for selfies.
But it dealt a major headache for the 16 million
residents of Turkey’s largest city, where cars ploughed into each other
skidding down steep, sleet-covered streets and highways turned into parking
lots.
The Istanbul governor’s office warned drivers they
would not be able to enter the city from Thrace — a region stretching across
the European part of Turkey to its western border with
Bulgaria and
Greece.
Shopping malls closed early, food delivery services
shut down and the city’s iconic “simit” bagel stalls stood empty because
suppliers could not make their way through the snow.
Traffic officials also closed majors roads across
large parts of central and southeastern Turkey, a mountainous region first hit
by a snowstorm last week.
Istanbul Airport serviced more than 37 million
passengers last year, becoming one of the world’s most important air hubs.
But critics of President
Recep Tayyip Erdogan had
long questioned his decision to place the airport on a remote patch along the
Black Sea coast that is often covered with fog in the winter.
“Due to adverse conditions, all flights have been
temporarily stopped for air safety,” the airport said in a statement, posting
pictures on Twitter of yellow snowplows circling stranded airplanes.
Turkish Airlines said it was suspending all Istanbul
Airport flights until at least 4:00am Tuesday.
The airport itself said it did expect service to
resume before midnight.
‘Everything is frozen’
Most of Turkey’s main institutions stayed opened on
Monday.
But in Turkey’s Aegean Sea neighbor Greece, where
overnight temperatures plummeted to -14°C, the storm suspended a session of
parliament and forced schools and vaccination centers to close in Athens.
Thousands of motorists were trapped in their cars
around Athens — many of them venting their anger on TV stations — despite attempts
by police to seal off motorway entry points in the northern part of the
capital.
“My wife has had nothing to eat since morning. We
had a small bottle of water between us,” one driver who identified himself only
as Christos told private Star TV.
“Everything is frozen stiff.”
Greece’s climate crisis and civil protection
minister
Christos Stylianides apologized for the chaos and blamed the company
managing the motorway for not keeping it open.
“If the company had acted appropriately, we would
not have had this problem,” he said in a televised address with local officials
and weather experts.
A cold snap with sub-zero temperatures and
gale-force winds last hit Athens in February 2021, killing four people on the
islands of Evia and Crete and leaving tens of thousands of households without
electricity for days.
Kostas Lagouvardos, research director at the
National Observatory of Athens, told ANT1 TV that the capital had not seen
back-to-back winters like this since 1968.
“It is an extreme condition for our country,”
Christos Zerefos, a Greek atmospheric physics professor, told state TV ERT.
The snow uncharacteristically fell on several Aegean
Sea islands, shutting off some mountain villages on Andros, Naxos and Tinos,
and covering beaches in Mykonos, in summer a tourist party island.
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