The extreme winter weather over a wide expanse of land from the Baltic states and Poland southward to the Mediterranean Sea left villages cut off, caused power and water outages, froze rivers and lakes, grounded flights and led to widespread road accidents, the Associated Press reported on Wednesday.
A third of the deaths have been in Poland. Italy, Greece, Bulgaria, Macedonia, Albania and the Czech Republic also reported fatalities. Migrants, the elderly and the homeless have been especially hard-hit.
Relief is in sight for many. The dangerous cold will linger across most of eastern Europe through the middle of the week before temperatures slowly moderate back closer to normal by the weekend, AccuWeather predicted.
Meanwhile, snow fell for the first time in 30 years Tuesday in the Albanian coastal city of Saranda, according to EUStorm, a European weather site.
Istanbul also reported about a foot of snow, leading to flight cancellations and school closures Monday and Tuesday.
Warsaw reported a low temperature of 3 degrees below zero over the weekend, the coldest there since February 2012. Temperatures plummeted to 13 below zero in the Czech Republic, where at least six people died from the cold.
Temperatures also plummeted to the lowest level in years in Warsaw, Minsk, Budapest, and Moscow.