Migrants Stranded Between Greece & Turkey

PanchoS, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

I hear Greece, I think islands. My guess is you do too.

So when I read that 38 Syrian migrants had been stranded on a island between Greece and Turkey, I couldn’t make that square with my mental map of Greece. And so, I give you, an actual map. (Look right.)

There is, it turns out, a river that separates the North East corner of Greece from North West corner of Turkey: the Evros river.

The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) wrote about the dangers of crossing the Evros river in 2017. Apparently, drownings (summer) and hypothermia (winter) are common.

As for the migrants now in the news — they report being on the island for about a month. (Some news outlets say it was only days.) There is no dispute that one child, a girl, died there. All of the migrants have now been relocated to mainland Greece.

-KitJ