This week’s Friday Bulletin falls on Valentine’s Day, and in the spirit of our 2025 guiding theme, Strength in Solidarity, we would like to invite you to make a tribute gift for your loved ones by dedicating a donation in their name.
As it happens, February 14 is also the day that I leave the Greek island of Lesvos, which has been my home for the last eight years. I’ve been thinking back about my time here and what made me stay so long.
I ended up here in 2017 kind of by chance. On my way to spend time with family in Iran, Lesvos was only supposed to be a stop along the way. The island was one of the epicentres of 2015’s “long summer of migration”, an event that prompted European leaders into short-lived performances of solidarity before becoming a rallying point for the continent’s far Right. By the time I got here, Lesvos was already notorious as a prison island, a place where Europe boasted of its experimental administration of unwanted people. But it had also gained a counter-reputation as a place where space was being reclaimed.
I decided to stay a while, hopeful that I could be useful but a little unsure of myself. What I found disarmed me: the place seemed almost colonised by industry. The administrators staffing the asylum services were mirrored by career humanitarians who came to manage the crisis. Looking back it seems they spoke the same language in different dialects; some obscured the crime with procedural jargon, while others smoothed its rough edges into something they could sell. None of them spoke a language that could describe the truth of the moment.
If that were it, I would have left. But eventually I came to see a community in which people had to enact their politics daily, sometimes through small gestures, sometimes taking huge risks.
In the agenda-setting capital cities of North Europe, newly-arrived migrants are abstracted into either villains or victims. But in the island’s small-town capital, Mytilene, we were neighbours. People stuck to their commitments, made their choices and lived by them: the people who took in runaways from the island’s brutal deportation prison; the community choir that barred the door to cops attempting to raid and detain one of their Black members; those who helped their neighbours living far from home to ride a wave of fascist violence. Put simply, people did their best to undo a legal system that had been developed to carry out injustice, and which broke its own rules to achieve its unspoken ends. At the same time, in this continental crossroads, new forms of mutual aid were born. We saw the spontaneous rebellion of people who refused to waste away in ghetto camps. And we saw men, imprisoned on no other basis than their nationality to some African states, emerge from jail as communities that lifted each other up and watched each other’s backs.
Over the years the space in which we can cultivate solidarity has shrunk. The Greek government has outlawed initiatives that resist its anti-migrant tendency. Europe poured millions into Lesvos, attempting to create a symbol of faceless administrative prowess. When that failed, it cast Lesvos as a symbol of its own decline. Now it resorts to unaccountable brute force. None of that has been enough to demolish this stop on an underground railroad of our times.
As my last 24 hours in Lesvos come to a close, what stays with me is the endless hours in smoke-filled rooms with people creating another way of doing things. We have consoled each others’ losses, and raised glasses to the rare victories. Strength in Solidarity seems a good description of what I will take with me.
