At least two people were killed and nearly 500 injured when a powerful earthquake hit the holiday resorts of Kos in Greece and Bodrum in Turkey in the early hours of yesterday.
Officials said that a Swedish tourist, named locally as Simon Nilsson, 22, and a Turkish man aged 39 had died when a wall collapsed into the White Corner Club in the old town of Kos after the quake at about 1.30am.
Another Swedish man was reported to have lost his lower leg and a Norwegian man was in a critical condition with a head injury.
The 6.7-magnitude quake also shook Turkey’s Aegean coast, and there were reports of tremors 50 miles inland. The hypocentre was seven miles (11km) northeast of Kos and six miles under the sea, the US Geological Survey said.
Experts said that the quake was among the strongest in decades. An earthquake in 1933 ruined most of the island, flattening the old town and resulting in 178 deaths.
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The old town was also the hardest hit yesterday, with damage to churches, an old mosque and the port’s 14th-century castle, Kerry Horafiou, a resident, said. She added that she had heard reports of people jumping off their balconies as the buildings shook.
Several Britons were caught up in the quake. Eleanor Ruddock and her daughter Naomi, 22, said they woke to find their room shaking, grabbed their phones and ran outside.
“We were asleep and we just felt the room shaking,” Ms Ruddock, who was staying with her mother at the Akti Palace resort in Kardamena, said. “Everything was moving. It felt like you were on a boat.”
On Kos many people spent the night outside on sunbeds or on beaches. Pictures shared on social media showed flooding on the island after a small tsunami. In Bodrum, on the Turkish coast, roads and buildings crumbled.
Of the 120 people hurt in Kos, 78 were treated for minor injuries, hospital officials said. A further 48 were being treated for more serious injuries.
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Linda Lundgren, who works at a bar close to the White Corner Club, said: “I saw every bartender jumping over the bar. The roof was falling and then everything just turned black.”
The Greek authorities sent helicopters to Kos to take the injured to Rhodes for treatment. Most of the injuries, about 350, were in Turkey, in Bodrum and other beach resorts. Sophie Wild, 21, from Canterbury, said she was awoken by banging in her third-floor apartment in Didim, 50 miles from Bodrum. “When we realised it was an earthquake, we ran downstairs,” she said. “People were running out of rooms, banging on people’s doors.”
Seismologists blamed the shallowness of the quake for the damage, and for the sea swell that scattered cars and boats across shores in the east Aegean. “For the strength of this earthquake . . . the damage was actually quite limited,” Efthymios Lekkas, who led a government inspection team on Kos, said. “Most people have been cleared to return home.”
Automated quake reporting systems estimated that up to 4.3 million people felt the tremors. More than 200 aftershocks have been triggered.
Seismologists warned of more to come. Gerassimos Papadopoulos said: “We can expect seismic activity for the next month and authorities must take this into serious consideration.”