Abandoned seaside resort in Greece now hosts refugees
MYRSINI, Greece — At the end of a long, straight road on the coastal flats between the southern Greek village of Myrsini and the Ionian Sea sits a refugee shelter that could have popped out of a travel brochure.
The 338 Syrians and Iraqis who have been living there since March say they’re grateful to be safe in seaside bungalows, but getting restless, eager to continue journeys they hope will take them to the more prosperous nations of Western Europe.
Local authorities volunteered the resort, which had been abandoned for years, to a Greek government that encountered strong opposition from some other communities as it quickly tried to build camps for tens of thousands of stranded refugees.
About a million people fleeing war or poverty in the Middle East and Africa arrived in Greece from neighboring Turkey between January 2015 and March 2016, when a series of countries farther north closed their borders. New arrivals have since dropped to a few thousand, mainly because of a new European Union deal for Turkey to host people who otherwise would have arrived by boat, but about 54,000 remain stranded in dozens of official camps — and two makeshift tent cities — across Greece, awaiting asylum in the financially broken country or relocation elsewhere on the continent.
Most of the organized camps consist of prefabricated units or canvas tents, set up hurriedly by the military. About 1,300 people live in the former arrivals area of the old Athens airport, and another 2,100 in defunct sports venues built for the 2004 Olympics.
In several cases, local communities bucked sharply at their selection to host migrant shelters, some ploughing the appointed sites overnight or fighting for days with riot police.
Not so in Myrsini, part of the municipality of Andravida and Kyllini. Municipality Mayor Nampil Morant is a Syrian immigrant himself, who married a Greek woman and settled in nearby Lechaina almost three decades ago. But he says that wasn’t what motivated his municipal council’s decision.
“We could see the dramatic situation of these refugees, the children that drowned at sea, the difficulties they face — and that can’t leave you untouched,” said Morant, a Paris- and Brussels-educated doctor born in Homs, a city ravaged by Syria’s civil war. In 2014 he became the first immigrant to win a Greek local election.
“The site was useless to us, it had been abandoned and was in the middle of a court process,” he said. “So we told the central government: ‘Look, this place is in a mess. If you want, you can have it, fix it up and put them there.’”
The Syrians and Iraqis, mostly families of women and children, moved there from a squalid encampment of thousands that sprang up on the quays of Piraeus, the port of Athens where Aegean island ferries dock.
Morant says he believes things have worked well so far, so much so that refugees from other parts of Greece are turning up on their own. But they’re sent away because Morant wants people to live in proper facilities.