Thousands of refugees and migrants fled the flames that tore through a camp under a coronavirus lockdown, on Greece's island of Lesbos.
The fire broke out at the overcrowded Moira camp just after midnight Tuesday, fire brigade officials said.
By early Wednesday morning, most of Moria had been reduced to a smouldering, mangled mass of burned shelters, with a few people searching the debris for their possessions.
There were no reports of injuries or fatalities, while the cause of the blaze which burned the tents and containers refugees had been living in was not immediately clear.
Moria was "probably totally destroyed", Migration Ministry official Manos Logothetis told the state-run Athens News Agency.Initial reports suggested fires broke out at different locations in the sprawling camp after authorities tried to isolate a number of individuals who tested positive for COVID-19.
"The fire is still raging, the camp has been evacuated. All these people are on the national road towards Mytilini. There are police out who are not letting them through. These people are sleeping left and right in the fields," Panagiotis Deligiannis, a witness from Moria, told Reuters news agency.
At least 25 firefighters on 10 engines, aided by police, battled the flames both inside and outside the facility, the fire brigade said, adding that the firefighters had been pushed back by camp residents during their efforts.
People were seen leaving the camp, carrying their belongings.
"The situation was out of control," policeman Argyris Syvris told Open TV, adding that police had been forced to release about 200 people held in a separate quarter of the camp who were to be repatriated to their countries.
The Moria facility, which hosts some 13,000 people - more than four times its stated capacity - has been frequently criticised by aid groups for poor living conditions.
It was placed under quarantine last week after authorities confirmed that an asylum seeker had tested positive for the novel coronavirus. Confirmed infections have risen to 35 since then.
Lesbos, which lies just off the Turkish coast, was on the front line of a massive movement of refugees and migrants to Europe in 2015 and 2016. Due to the pandemic, since March 1, all arrivals to the island have been quarantined away from the camps.
In the Moria camp, aid groups have warned that physical distancing and basic hygiene measures are impossible to implement due to the living conditions.Camp residents fled after the fire broke out, grabbing any belongings they could.
Many, like Afghan Omid Alizada, left with nothing.
Sitting on the side of a road between Moria and the main town of Mytilene with thousands of others from the camp, he said: "We left with nothing, only the clothes on our body. Thousands of people rescued their lives from this huge fire, they are wandering in the streets and left the camp to go to Mytilene."
There were unconfirmed reports that there were police-initiated blockades along the road between Moria and Mytilene, preventing people from reaching the main town.
The fire brought fresh tragedy to the residents of the infamous refugee camp, which was under quarantine restrictions due to an outbreak of COVID-19 last week; cases have since been steadily rising.
As of Tuesday, there had been at least 35 confirmed cases in the camp.
In response to the fire, Ylva Johansson, the European Commissioner for Home Affairs tweeted that she had agreed to finance the immediate transfer to the mainland of the remaining 400 unaccompanied children and teenagers, a sum which would include accommodation.
"The safety and shelter of all people in Moria is the priority," she said.
Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis called ministers to an emergency meeting.
Faris al-Jawad from Doctors Without Borders, known by its French initials MSF, told Al Jazeera that his group still did not have clarity on whether there were injuries or deaths.
Most Moria residents were on the road between Moria and the main town of Mytilene, he said, with some people now returning to the site to collect any belongings they could salvage."It's fair to say that after five years of trapping people in barbaric and inhumane conditions, at some point something like this was inevitable," he said. "It seems impossible for everyone to go back to Moria tomorrow, everyone needs to be evacuated to a safe place on the mainland or to other EU countries."
"Ali Mustafa, a 19-year-old Moria resident, said that he had not slept at all.
"I saw bad things with my eyes," he said. "Nothing is left and most of the people are sleeping in the streets, they don't have money to buy anything, they lost everything last night."
