South Korea’s Worst Ever Wildfires Ravage Ancient Buddhist Temples and Menace Historic Villages
One monk said his old temple was ‘reduced to heaps of ashes,’ as the fires continue to rage across the country
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The largest wildfires in South Korea’s history have blazed for seven days, leaving dozens dead and destroying or severely damaging several of the country’s most revered historical sites.
As of Thursday, 27 people have died and at least 37,000 have been evacuated from their homes, the New York Times’ Jin Yu Young reports. The fires have ravaged 88,000 acres in the country’s southeast and are showing few signs of slowing.
“Damages are snowballing,” South Korea’s prime minister and acting president Han Duck-soo said in a televised address yesterday, according to Kim Tong-Hyung and Hyung-Jin Kim of the Associated Press.
“There are concerns that we’ll have wildfire damages that we’ve never experienced, so we have to concentrate all our capabilities to put out the wildfires in the rest of this week,” the president added.
The fires have not spared Korea’s sacred cultural heritage sites, destroying at least 18 designated heritage sites, Reuters’ Nicoco Chan and Hongji Kim report.
One of the most staggering losses is the 1,300-year-old Gounsa temple complex in Uiseong County, around 90 miles southeast of Seoul. Monks started the temple in 681, as the Silla dynasty promoted Buddhism across the unified Korean Peninsula.
While no Silla-era structures lasted to the present day, Gounsa is still an active Buddhist site, filled with buildings, statues and artifacts from the intervening centuries. As witnesses recall, however, the fire swiftly consumed this history.
“There was a wind stronger than a typhoon, and flames whipped through the air like a tornado, burning the whole area in an instant,” Gounsa temple chief Deungwoon tells Reuters. “The buildings and remains of what Buddhist monks have left over 1,300 years are now all gone.”
Parts of Gounsa have burned before, but never to this extent. The Korea Heritage Service reports that the fire completely destroyed 20 of the 30 buildings at the complex, per the AP’s Hyung-Jin Kim. Two “national treasure” sites—Gaunru, a revered stream-side pavilion from 1668, and Yeonsujeon Hall, built to store genealogical records of the royal family—succumbed to the blaze.
“I went there this morning and found they’ve been reduced to heaps of ashes,” Doryun, a senior monk who used to live at the temple, tells the AP. “I feel really empty. Life is transient.”
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Doryun explains that 20 monks and workers based at the temple have been evacuated without injury. Miraculously, the main temple building survived. “Many buildings were burned down, but we moved and protected other sacred assets so that we can maintain the temple. We feel it’s very fortunate,” Doryun tells the AP.
The fires have also menaced the Hahoe Folk Village, a UNESCO World Heritage site in Andong. Located along the banks of the Nakdong River, Hahoe is one of the “most representative historic clan villages” in the country, according to the UNESCO website. The Ryu family traces its origins in Hahoe back six centuries to the time of the Joseon dynasty. Its mud-walled houses with thatched roofs face out onto the river and open fields, a distinctive architectural style that takes inspiration from aristocratic Confucian culture. At the highest point in the village is Samsindang, a giant zelkova tree that villagers believe is the residence of the goddess Samsin. Residents of Hahoe have evacuated and authorities have taken preventative measures to insulate the village from the encroaching fires. Another UNESCO site, the Byeongsanseowon Confucian Academy, also from the Joseon dynasty, is under threat, per the Times.
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At historic sites across the region, the government has coordinated major efforts to remove more than 1,500 relics from threatened sites and historic houses, according to Reuters.
Earlier this year, wildfires in Southern California burned through Los Angeles’ historic landmarks—a gloomy parallel to this week’s tragedies in South Korea.
So far in 2025, South Korea has reported 244 wildfires, over twice as many as during the same period last year, according to CNN’s Gawon Bae and Kathleen Magramo. Firefighters have not yet contained some of the strongest blazes, although officials hoped that a sprinkling of rain on Thursday would aid their emergency efforts, the Times reports. “The sadness is indescribable,” Kim Young-hoo, a 70-year-old devotee of Gounsa, tells Reuters. “As a follower who cherishes this place, it pains my heart to see it destroyed so horribly.”
