The wave of freezing weather claimed three more lives in Romania by Wednesday, bringing the death toll in that country to 18, while three people died in Serbia and Bulgaria.
The latest Romanian victims froze in the country’s north-east, where in the eastern Carpathian mountains temperatures plunged to as low as minus 32 degrees Celsius.
A kilometre-wide belt of ice locked the Black Sea coast and ice also hampered shipping on the Danube.
Heating systems continued to break down in the north-east and Bucharest, where 50 schools remained closed and hospitals were turning back patients. In the capital, the sale of warm clothes and electric heaters went up by 20%, local reports said.
In Serbia, a second homeless man froze to death in the past two days. The latest victim, aged 67, succumbed in Arandjelovac, 50km south of Belgrade, newspapers reported on Wednesday.
Heating problems continued to plague the country, with the capital seeing minus 13 degrees Celsius in the early morning and temperatures as low as 28 degrees below zero recorded in some areas of the country.
The current cold wave also claimed its first victim in Bulgaria — a 75-year-old man was found frozen on his property in the northern Dobric area, local media reported.
The mercury hovered at about 19 below zero in Vidin, the coldest place in Bulgaria. A freezing gale forced the closure of the Black Sea port Burgas and some remote areas lost electricity and water supplies.
Schools remained closed in Sofia and 13 of Bulgaria’s 28 administrative units.
There were cold and windy conditions in both in Montenegro (which saw as low as minus 23 degrees Celsius) and Croatia (about 16 below zero), but the two countries saw no deaths or major problems with heating and traffic.
Albania remained on the outskirts of the frosty area, but temperatures as low as 12 degrees below zero and problems with the power grid forced the closure of schools in several highland areas, the ATA news agency reported.
A storm and ice also forced the rescheduling of the ferry between Brindisi (Italy) Vlore/Valona (Albania) on Tuesday afternoon, the agency said.
Fifty-three people have died in Ukraine during the past 24 hours as a result of extreme cold, the health ministry said on Wednesday, bringing to at least 130 the number of deaths since temperatures plunged last week.
Meteorologists predict that the freezing anticyclone will weaken and dissipate above the Balkans by Thursday and be replaced by milder weather.
Heavy snowfalls have also severely disrupted life right across Turkey with reports that two people had frozen to death.
Anadolu news agency reported that a homeless man froze to death on the streets of Istanbul on Monday night and that another man died after falling into a snow drift in the eastern Turkish town of Karaman.
Authorities have logged more than 1 000 accidents in Istanbul alone, with the death toll across the country from the three days of snow standing at more than a dozen.
Thousands of villages in eastern Turkey have suffered electricity cuts and internal flights have been severely disrupted.
Meteorological experts have predicted further heavy snowfalls and low temperatures for the rest of the week.
Meanwhile, the Russian capital, Moscow, emerged on Wednesday from the grip of the Siberian cold front, posting a comparatively mild minus 12 degrees Celsius to an approving chorus of sparrow song.
Moscow’s human and animal population hunkered down last week as temperatures plummeted below minus 30 during a record-breaking spell of harsh weather.
One person still died of exposure overnight, health officials said.
The severe cold continued in other parts of Russia, with the Siberian city of Novosibirsk experiencing a local record temperature of minus 49,9 degrees Celsius.
In one of a series of recent power breakdowns, 600 residents of the town of Balei near Lake Baikal were without heating for the sixth day as the mercury hovered around minus 32 degrees. — Sapa-dpa, Sapa-AFP