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2013; Iliadou, 2012; Lauth Bacas, 2010) and multiple reports from Human Rights
Organisations. Between 2000 and 2014, Lesvos Island and the “refugee issue” did not
attract as much attention as the “refugee crisis” of 2015. It was only after the death of
Aylan Kurdi, a three-year-old Syrian refugee child, whose dead body was washed ashore
upon the coasts of Turkey, that the public opinion and the cold EU technocrats were
sensitised to the phenomenon which had gradually unfolded since the 1990s in Lesvos
and Greece. Thus, the beginning of the refugee crisis is chronologically located in Aylan
Kurdi’s death, who also became “an allegory of refugeeness” (Khosravi, 2010, p. 73). As
Miriam Ticktin denotes, “The photo [of Aylan Kurdi] gave the “migrant crisis” a new face:
innocence. It shamed Europe into action” (Ticktin, 2016, p. 258).
The “crisis” as a discourse and sequence of events which unfolded and was reproduced by
policymakers, the media and humanitarian organisations from 2015 onwards was so
overwhelming that Lesvos Island became suddenly famous. When I moved to the UK in
September 2015 to conduct my PhD research on the multiple and intersectional forms of
violence and harm border crossers experience on Lesvos, the vast majority of people I
spoke to had never heard of Lesvos. I remember someone asking me “Lesvos? Where is
that? Is it in Malta?” However, in the aftermath of the refugee crisis, Lesvos became so
famous that even Skala Sykamias -a small fishing village on Lesvos- was announced as the
most popular holiday destination from AFAR travel magazine, due to the spectacle of
border crossing and solidarity of the local people (Cosgrove, 2016; economy65, 2017).
Lesvos became a popular destination, by attracting celebrities, volunteers and
‘voluntourists’ (Gillespie, 2018; Rozakou, 2016), journalists and academics, NGOs and even
profiteers (lesvosnews, 2015). The scale of this intervention of various actors, particularly
of NGOs, was so enormous that throughout the research process even I was repeatedly
asked by local people, “Are you working for an NGO?” By having first-hand lived
experiences and “bearing witness” to multiple border crossings, humanitarian “crises”,
sufferings, pain and deaths in time and space, this “crisis” panic (in terms of discourse,
intervention and humanitarianism) seemed to me incomprehensible from the beginning,
whilst mixed feelings of anger and sadness overwhelmed me. How can people, the media
and particularly EU and Greek policymakers be sensitised only now by the death of a
single child? What about the thousands of deaths of children, women and men within the
Aegean and Mediterranean Sea crossroads from 2000 onwards (see Albahari, 2015, 2016;
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