All throughout the village of Chalkios, home to around 1,100 people and located on the Greek island of Chios, are idyllic, stone homes surrounded by rolling orchards. Olive trees fleck the fields, tractors clatter up and down the right roads, and farmers tend to their crops: citrus fruits, almonds, and beans, among others. But as you push deeper into the village, past the shopkeepers sitting in front of their aging storefronts and the kafeneios where locals gather for coffee, you eventually spot the groups of refugees and migrants plodding along the roadside. Continue further still and you end up at the entrance of Vial, an old recycling plant that is also home to the island’s only official refugee camp. There, hundreds of asylum seekers reside in containers, having already risked crossing the Aegean Sea, a task that, thanks to a Greek and European crackdown on refugee movement, is becoming increasingly dangerous.
One Friday afternoon in late November, I drove to Chalkios and parked down the road from Vial, where some 1,200 people resided in a space that was meant to accommodate no more than 1,014. It was my fourth trip to the camp since 2016, the year after the so-called refugee crisis erupted. Throughout the near decade since, media reports and rights groups have described Vial as a symbol of “shame,” a “prison,” a place that “makes prison look like a five-star hotel,” “a vision of hell,” and “a living hell.” The number of asylum seekers in Vial peaked in 2020 when nearly 5,000 were registered at the camp. Because the camp couldn’t fit everyone, thousands of people had taken up in shoddy tents in the fields around Vial. Now, the fields are empty again, but camp residents say they live in densely packed containers, each one home to up to 15 people, while they wait for Greek authorities to process their asylum claims.
I found Hassan and Mahmoud* not far from Vial’s entrance. The two Afghan teenagers had already been in the camp for more than three months. Like everyone else there, they had joined groups of people on overpacked boats that set off from Turkish shores. They hadn’t known each other before they got to Vial, but they had since become friends. In the cramped, bug-infested confines of the containers they lived in, they explained, life had proven difficult.
Neither had wanted to leave Afghanistan in the first place, but they both felt they had no other option. Neither had an easy time stomaching what they described as often undercooked or expired food rations or navigating the frequent water shortages in the camp. Both had long since run out of money to purchase food or clean water elsewhere. Both had bug bites on their arms and legs, and both were battling stubborn colds as winter brought plummeting temperatures. There were few doctors, they explained, and when they did manage to see one, they received little help. Both had already spent much of their lives as refugees — Hassan in Iran and Turkey, Mahmoud in Pakistan and Turkey.
Hassan, whose family is from Herat, was only 17 when he crossed the sea. His birthday had since come and gone, and I asked him whether he had thoughts on turning 18 in a refugee camp. He only shrugged. He coughed lightly now and then as he spoke. Since his father passed away, he explained, he had become the only male in his immediate family, and he made the trip to Europe first with the hopes of helping his mother and sisters also make it out of Turkey, a country that, despite European claims, rights groups insist remains unsafe for refugees and migrants. The day Hassan left for Greece was the first time he had ever stepped on a boat, he told me, and the smuggler in charge of the trip packed some 50 people aboard, including many women and children. The journey from Turkey to Chios is only a few miles, but rain was pounding down hard, and the water was rough. “The children and women were very scared,” Hassan said.
Mahmoud was 19, and his family came from Kandahar, in southern Afghanistan. He’d spent a period working in a factory in Turkey before he set out for Europe. Unlike Hassan, whose group made it to Greece on the first try, Mahmoud didn’t reach the island until the third attempt. The Greek coast guard, he said, had stopped and pushed back the boats he was on the first two times, forcing the passengers to return to Turkish territorial waters. Such extrajudicial expulsions are known as pushbacks, and they often violate international law. In many cases, pushbacks also include violence. “One of my friends … they broke his hand,” Mahmoud said of Greek authorities, “and then they made him go back to Turkey. It’s so hard.”
As they spoke, a group of young men from the camp punted a soccer ball around on a small field behind them. Guards mulled around in front of the barbed-wire fence, smoking cigarettes and staring at their telephones. A police car inched past, and the officers inside peered out through the cracked windows. The sun sagged low, and the last of it glinted off the tight curls of concertina wire that adorn the fence enclosing the camp.
“Piling Up and Piling Up”
In November 2015, I traveled to the Greek island of Lesbos for the first time. There, on the shores of Skala Skamnias, a village on the island’s northern tip, humanitarians, activists, and journalists crowded beneath the myrtle trees on the shore and peered out at the waves, waiting for boats from Turkey. Greeks and internationals alike helped people — Syrians, Afghans, and Iraqis, among others — off the dinghies they had taken across the Aegean. That year, war, instability, and poverty drove nearly a million people from the Middle East, South Asia, and Africa to risk the trek to Greece. Most people continued onward to Western Europe, spending only a few days, if that, on the islands. The solidarity stood out to me at the time, as did the hope on the faces of many people who, despite the difficult journey that still awaited them, had escaped bloodshed.
Yet, even in those early months of what became known as the refugee crisis, there were signs of how ugly the future was poised to become. In November 2015, the Republic of Macedonia sealed its border with northern Greece to many nationalities, and as the water grew rougher, the number of people drowning or disappearing at sea was swelling by the day. In the village of Idomeni, on Greece’s northern land border, thousands of people found themselves bottlenecked in a temporary camp, sometimes facing Macedonian border guards who shoved them back as they queued at the boundary and at times fired tear gas, rubber bullets, and stun grenades at the crowds. Making it out of Greece didn’t put an end to the misery, either. Across the so-called Balkan route to Western Europe, refugees told me of rampant exploitation at the hands of smugglers, of camping out amid worsening winter weather, of beatings they endured by police in countries like Bulgaria, Serbia, and Hungary.
For many, long-held dreams of finding safety were dashed in March 2016, when the European Union and Turkey struck a deal to reduce the number of boats leaving the Turkish coast. Countries across the Balkan route closed their borders. In Greece, the government, led then by the left-wing Syriza party, ordered asylum seekers who crossed the sea to remain on a handful of islands until their applications reached a certain stage in the process. By the time I first visited Chios, in June 2016, the EU-Turkey deal had been in place for three months, and thousands of refugees were spread out across Vial and a pair of makeshift camps in the island’s eponymous main town.
Greece’s fifth largest island, Chios has a population of around 54,000. Throughout history, the island has earned an international reputation for the mastic trees that, according to the British historian William St. Clair, once ranked it among the Ottoman Empire’s “most valuable provinces”; those trees produce a resin used in gums, digestive liqueurs, and desserts, among other products. But its past is also dotted with tragedies. As St. Clair observed, Ottoman forces quelled a nationalist uprising on the island in 1822, killing or enslaving tens of thousands. In 1922, during the genocide of Greeks in Asia Minor, Chios absorbed thousands of refugees. Later still, after the German Nazi occupation of the island ended, a devastating civil war tore Greece apart between 1946 and 1949, during which the Western-backed government shipped communist women and their children into internal exile on many islands, including at an internment camp on Chios.
But a history of violent oppression, enforced exile, and mass displacement doesn’t necessarily immunize a place from nativism. When I first visited the island eight years ago, at makeshift camps called Dipethe and Souda, refugees and migrants, along with the humanitarians who supported them, told me they were enduring near-daily harassment at the hands of far-right locals. Sometimes, the attackers shot fireworks at their tents or hurled stones at them and their children, and threats of even more severe violence became routine. One local humanitarian, who had spent much of the previous summer using a jet ski to save refugees at sea, explained that someone had passed on the ominous threat that he was “on the list,” words he took to mean that his life might be in danger.
Throughout the years that followed, resentment mushroomed across Greece as the boats continued setting sail from Turkey and the number of refugees and migrants stuck on the islands continued to soar. Public opinion began to turn against the asylum seekers, solidarity withered, and in the July 2019 elections, voters replaced the left-wing government with one headed by the right-wing New Democracy party. New Democracy had campaigned, in part, on promises to escalate deportations and drastically reduce the number of refugees reaching the country. Anti-refugee sentiment spiraled. In late 2019 and early 2020, mayors on some islands led mobs of locals who blocked asylum seekers from disembarking on their islands. Attacks on refugees, migrants, and humanitarians rattled communities from the islands to the mainland. In February 2020, the number of asylum seekers on five Aegean islands reached 42,000, a total that was more than seven times more than the combined capacity of their camps.
I traveled to Chios that same month. The unofficial camps had closed, and Vial was home to around 4,700 asylum seekers, four times what it could accommodate. Syrians, Afghans, Iraqis, Palestinians, and others strung tarps to olive trees and slapped together pieces of sheet metal and scrap wood for tents in the fields around the camp. Exposed to the winter cold, many told me they were growing sicker by the day, and whenever it rained, the shelters offered little protection. Campfires burned through the nights, and the constant sound of coughing echoed between the tents.
As anti-refugee protests mounted in Athens and beyond, the New Democracy government announced more plans to stem the tide of boats. Near Lesbos, the government said it would build a 2.7-kilometer (1.67-mile) long “floating border wall,” a proposal a former migration minister blasted as a “stupid idea” and that Amnesty International warned would “lead to more danger for those desperately seeking safety.” That wall never panned out, but the New Democracy government also had another plan: to replace the open camps with closed camps, facilities residents could leave during the daytime but would be required to stay overnight in. Rights groups warned such closed facilities would be prison-like. The plan also prompted pushback on many islands, some rooted in concerns over human rights violations but much of it driven by nativist fears of a permanent refugee presence in the communities. Unrest erupted on Chios and Lesbos, and riot police clashed with locals in the streets. Some far-right hardliners from around Europe even showed up in Greece to rally against refugees, further stirring up tensions.
In late February and early March of that year, when the Turkish government said it would no longer prevent departures and allowed a buildup of some 13,000 refugees and migrants on Greece’s northeastern land border, clashes erupted, including one incident in which a bullet struck and killed a Pakistani man. On the islands, masked men turned up at camps and issued threats, fires were routinely set, and vigilante groups hunted and attacked asylum seekers, humanitarians, and journalists. Michael Trammer, a German journalist, traveled to Lesbos around that time to cover the growing unrest on the island. As hostility, anger, and conspiracy theories fanned out, he was struck by the feeling that the discontent was “piling up and piling up,” that each passing day was tenser than the last. “The word paranoia describes it quite well,” he told me.
On March 1, 2020, Trammer rushed to the Thermos Port to cover the arrival of a boat carrying asylum seekers. There, a group of locals shouted racist slurs at the passengers, tossing plastic bottles at them, and some even tried to use a stick to push the dinghy back away from the pier. As Trammer filmed the incident, a handful of people swarmed him, beat him, knocked him to the ground, and flung his equipment into the sea. Bleeding from his head, he had to go to the hospital and receive stitches, a journey that took longer than it should have thanks to the roadblocks vigilantes had erected along the way. Because authorities had effectively withdrawn from the community, Trammer told me, a vacuum emerged. “Since that day,” he said, “I’m asking myself how much of it was calculated, how much of it was part of the strategy of deterrence.”
“Our Duty to Help Others”
The day after I met Hassan and Mahmoud at the camp, a long line of people gathered on a dirt road slicing through an olive tree orchard located a five-minute walk from Vial. It was early afternoon, and the camp residents came in packs. Many joked and laughed together. Some limped. Some came with children. Most coughed and sneezed, hugging themselves against the sharp wind. Some groups spoke in Arabic, others in Kurdish or Somali. Once there, they joined the queue and waited for humanitarian assistance: basic food supplies and winter clothes. Whenever someone’s turn came, they submitted a ticket the volunteers had already passed out for them to keep track of who received distribution. Then, a volunteer logged their information into a laptop, thanked them, and sent them down the line to another volunteer, who would give them a couple bags of goods from the back of a van and wish them a nice day.
The volunteers included young people from elsewhere in Europe and camp residents themselves. Together, they tried to ensure that the queue remained tight and orderly, and that no one ventured off into the olive tree fields on either side of the road. Always aware of the way tensions could spike on a dime, they wanted to avoid upsetting the orchards’ owners. Now and then, villagers drove down the path; some waved and smiled, while others just stared straight ahead and gassed it past the distribution site.
Although humanitarian groups maintain a large presence on other islands, such as Lesbos and Samos, Refugee Biryani & Bananas, the organization that conducts the distributions in Chalkios, is one of the few still operating on Chios. Ruhi Akhtar, a 34-year-old British Bangladeshi humanitarian and former podiatrist, founded the organization. Although she has worked in different spots around Europe and has launched a new humanitarian support project to support Palestinians in the war-stricken Gaza Strip since October 2023, Akhtar has continued to visit and work on Chios for the last seven years.
In recent years, Akhtar and her organization have received a growing number of reports of people who go missing along the way to Europe. More and more single women and unaccompanied children turned up on the island, as have more people who endured pushbacks or are in need of psychological support. Many of those who showed up at the aid group’s distribution have serious injuries or illnesses — scabies, untreated infections, and diabetes, for instance — and in the camps, people were more fearful of speaking out about the violence and hardships they faced on the borders. “I just don’t know how people are surviving,” she told me.
Akhtar has kept the project alive despite funding challenges and risks to her own personal safety. In fact, although the police had not charged her with any crimes, they did name her in a criminal investigation opened some three years ago. To her knowledge, that probe — part of a broader crackdown on humanitarians working with refugees and migrants — remains open. Such animosity toward humanitarian groups has taken a toll. “Every time I travel, I’m worried,” she said. “Every time there’s a new article out, I wonder if there’s something going on with me.”
Investigation or not, Akhtar intended to continue her work so long as war and conflict are displacing people to European shores, and so long as that displacement continues to put people at risk of injury or death. The less visible the plight of refugees becomes, she felt, the more important humanitarian support is. “It’s really our duty to help others,” she said, “so that’s why we’ve continued.”
A More Dangerous Journey
Since the chaos of early 2020, the New Democracy-led government has tried to strike a balancing act, at once presenting itself to the broader international community as committed to human rights while assuring a domestic audience that it is doing all that it can to seal the borders. In August 2021, then migration minister Notis Mitarachi announced that Greece was “no longer experiencing a migration crisis.” Last year, New Democracy won reelection, while three far-right, anti-immigrant parties also gained enough votes to make it into the Hellenic Parliament.
Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis, who describes Greek migration policy as “tough but fair,” has supported the European Union’s controversial new migration pact, which the bloc hopes will reduce the number of refugee arrivals. At a press conference in Vienna this September, Mitsotakis boasted that his government’s policies had led to “far fewer” people taking boats from Turkey to Greek islands, and insisted that Greece had stridently defended its borders “with absolute respect for the protection of human life.”
The Greek Ministry of Migration did not respond to a request for comment, but such claims ring hollow to critics and watchdogs. On land and at sea, Greek authorities have ramped up border patrols, made use of drones and other surveillance technology, and relied on brute force. In November 2023, Doctors Without Borders (MSF) released a report that detailed widespread pushbacks and violence on Greece’s borders. According to that report, refugees and migrants told the humanitarian agency that Greek authorities had beaten, clubbed, and punched them before expelling them from Greek territory. Along with the violence, they told MSF, came intimidation: border guards shot their firearms into the air, issued threats, confiscated or destroyed people’s personal belongings, and subjected many to invasive strip searches. The Greek government has often denied that it carries out pushbacks at all. It has also increasingly charged people with smuggling, though rights groups often say the authorities wantonly charge asylum seekers who take the wheel of a boat whenever the smuggler flees.
Although arrivals have never returned to the historic heights of 2015, Greece’s deterrence strategy might never completely succeed in discouraging people from crossing the Aegean. The number of people reaching the country has consistently risen over the last three years. Last year, more than 48,000 refugees and migrants arrived in Greece, a 159% increase from 2022. This year has already topped 2023: as of Dec. 8, there were more than 58,226 new arrivals to the country.
During a recent parliamentary debate, Migration Minister Nikos Panagiotopoulos said that war, political unrest, and climate change, among other factors, are “forcing many to abandon their homes simply to survive” and have fueled “a significant increase in migration and refugee flows since late 2023.”
Still, watchdogs and critics warn that increased border patrols and growing risks of the Aegean crossing have made refugees and migrants more dependent on smuggling networks and pushed them to take more dangerous routes to the continent. Asylum seekers now land on harder-to-reach islands more often than they once did, and reports of coast guard chases, boat-ramming incidents, and shootouts are making headlines with alarming frequency. In July, for instance, a smuggler on a speedboat carrying refugees and migrants allegedly shot at a Greek coast guard vessel near Chios before turning back and escaping to Turkish waters. The following month, the Greek coast guard opened fire during a boat chase near the island of Symi, reportedly killing a 39-year-old migrant. In November, one boat carrying 31 people, including 12 children, washed ashore on an uninhabited islet near the island of Agathonisi.
Between 2014 and 2023, more than 3,320 people died or went missing while making the crossing to Greece, according to the United Nations. In June 2023, a fishing trawler carrying refugees and migrants capsized off the Greek coast, killing up to 600 people and making it the deadliest year on record since the crisis first hit the country in 2015. Such risky and fatal incidents are becoming increasingly common across Europe. Countries from Italy and Croatia to Hungary and Bulgaria also stand accused of using pushbacks, and if you zoom out to look at the entire Mediterranean Sea, the number of people who have died en route to Europe since 2014 grows to more than 31,000.
By email, a European Commission spokesperson said that the bloc’s “position has always been clear: saving lives at sea is a moral duty, as well as a legal obligation” for EU member countries as well as a requirement “under international law.” The spokesperson said the European Commission “intends to continue engaging with [Turkey] on all relevant matters in cooperation on migration, namely border management and fight against migrant smuggling.”
“In addition, the Commission will enhance the cooperation with partner countries through a new approach,” the spokesperson added, “which embeds migration in international partnerships in order to prevent irregular departures, fight migrant smuggling, reinforce cooperation on readmission, and promote legal pathways.”
For his part, Yanis Varoufakis, head of the country’s left-wing MeRA25 party and a former parliamentarian who also briefly served as finance minister during the Syriza-led government, doubted that the prime minister cares as much about reducing the number of arrivals as he does about maintaining a coalition between the center-right and the hardline far right. “To keep the xenophobes and the fascists and racists happy among the population,” he argued, Mitsotakis has effectively adopted the view “that unless people die in the Aegean, the flows won’t stop.” The way Varoufakis saw it, the government “doesn’t care so much about shutting the border, but it’s prepared to let the coast guard kill people to maintain this tacit agreement between the radical center and the neo-fascists.”
On a pale morning during my recent visit to Chios, I drove out to a local cemetery that sits on a mountain perch overlooking the Aegean. A few miles north of Chios’s main town, the cemetery offers a clear view of the coastline in Çeşme, the Turkish town across the sea. Row after row of white gravestones with Greek names were neatly kept and freshly cleaned. Bouquets of flowers were propped up against the headstones, and on some sat small white candles.
Further back, in a corner tucked behind a building, I found the part of the cemetery reserved for refugees and migrants. The first time I’d gone there, in the summer of 2016, there were only a handful of graves. Now, around 40 plots dotted the weed-ridden patch of land. The wind had strewn garbage here and there, and wrappers, Styrofoam coffee cups, and cigarette butts pocked the grave plots. Volunteers had acquired proper headstones for some of the graves, but others were spare and makeshift.
On one plot, it appeared as if someone had used a stick to write the deceased’s name, birthdate, and date of death on the concrete while it was still drying. Another had no headstone at all — it consisted only of stones arranged on the earth in a rectangle roughly the length and width of a human body. Some belonged to elderly people, others to young children. One was the final resting place for a two-month-old, and yet another had only one date written on it: buried there was a stillborn baby.
“Nothing We Can Do”
The next morning, I went back to the distribution site near the refugee camp. The temperature had dropped overnight, and knife-like gusts of wind cut across the fields. I met a 26-year-old Kurdish volunteer as he walked up and down the line, chatting with camp residents waiting for aid. He had shaggy hair, kept his hands stuffed in his pockets, and smiled often as he glided back and forth between Arabic, Kurdish, and English.
He asked me to call him Azad*, a Kurdish word for free. He had recently obtained asylum in Greece, but growing up in Syria’s Rojava region and spending a decade as a refugee in Turkey had left a lasting mark. He said he hadn’t yet shaken the fear of speaking out publicly. I asked why he first left Rojava, and his response was simple: the Turkish military was “bombing our cities.” In Turkey, he explained, he had legal residency papers for a while, but it eventually became impossible to renew those documents. “They treat us very badly,” he said of the Turkish government. “If we speak our language, or if we want to [fly] our flag … they can take you to jail.”
Unable to legally remain in Turkey, he had felt the urgency of the only two options in front of him: to either return to Syria, where 13 years of civil war had ravaged the country, or to brave the trek to Europe. Earlier this year, he made the decision, and one morning not long after, he joined nearly 20 people on a Greece-bound speedboat. “They were absolutely scared,” he said of his fellow passengers, but unlike so many others, their boat reached Greek shores on the first try. Once on Chios, he heard “terrible” stories of other asylum seekers who “tried many times” to reach Greece, he told me, but the coast guard “pushed them back and beat them.”
Meanwhile, he faced the same deteriorating living conditions everyone else did in Vial. Sometimes, camp authorities expelled certain residents before they obtained their asylum decisions, he explained, and because there was a shortage of translators, doctors at times screamed at patients who couldn’t communicate in either English or Greek. “They just get furious with the people without any reason,” he said.
The filth, too, wore on him. The bathrooms were often in disrepair, and the camp staff rarely cleaned the facilities. During water shortages, he said, the toilets wouldn’t flush. “It’s really dirty, and they don’t clean it at all,” he went on. “So, all the time it’s — sorry to say it — full of shit.” The food, which he felt like was fit “for animals,” sometimes came undercooked, a problem that left some residents ill. In such conditions, fights often broke out between people of different nationalities: Palestinians and Somalis, for instance, or Afghans and Syrians. The way he saw it, anxiety over the limited resources inevitably piled up atop the anger and frustration that come with life in a camp. In the meantime, he was preparing to leave, hoping to reunite with family elsewhere in Europe.
Azad got back to work, tending to the queue and collecting tickets, and I walked back to Vial one last time. It had rained the night before, but the sun was now cutting through the clouds. Beyond the barbed wire, people were stepping out of their containers, hanging laundry on the outside window sills and the chain-link fence. I met Hassan outside the camp. We stood on a rocky perch overlooking the soccer field. His cough had thickened over the weekend, and he didn’t feel well. He told me that authorities had approved Mahmoud’s asylum request, and his friend left for the Greek mainland earlier that morning. For his part, he hadn’t even done his asylum interview yet and had no idea when he might be able to leave Chios.
That morning, a boat had sunk near the island of Samos, killing eight people; six of them were children. In the coming days, another vessel would capsize near Samos — two women and two children died — and later that week, the Greek coast guard would have to rescue nearly 80 people in two separate incidents near Gavdos, the country’s southernmost island.
But at that moment, Hassan apologized. He was tired and wanted to go back inside the camp to phone his family. As we parted ways, I asked him whether the dangerous crossing and the dismal conditions in the camp had left him with any regrets about coming to Europe. His shoulders slumped, and he shook his head. Sure, it was difficult, he admitted, but what other choice did he have? “Everyone wants to stay in their own country with their own language, with the places they know,” he said. Pausing for a moment, he looked back at the camp. “But there’s nothing we can do.”
*Denotes the use of a pseudonym.
First top photo: A humanitarian volunteer on the shore of Lesbos island as a refugee boat approaches in late 2015.
Second top photo: A corner of a local cemetery on the island of Chios is reserved for refugees and migrants.
