Graduate Journal of Social Science, Volume 15, Issue 1 experiences for me which still haunt me as nightmares. I lived and worked for various Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs) on Lesvos Island by supporting border crossers, survivors of torture, violence and trafficking including unaccompanied minors for more than a decade. This support, in the language of my profession, is commonly framed as “aid work”. Parallel to my work, I have been politically involved in local activist movements supporting border crossers. In 2008 I traversed the threshold of Pagani “reception” centre for border crossers on Lesvos in order to provide social support to people who were reaching Lesvos (Iliadou, 2012). Naively, during that period, I thought that Pagani, termed a “reception centre”, but in practice, a detention centre was the worst space in Greece. Through the passage of time and accompanying otherwise unaccompanied minors from detention centres to reception facilities, I had access to various “reception” centres within the Greek mainland. I thus observed, lived and served as an “eyewitness” (Ellis, Adams, & Bochner, 2011) of what is framed as the continuum of politics of detention as well as the insult and violation of human dignity. “Reception” centres within the Greek mainland and Lesvos before the “refugee crisis” era have systematically been condemned for the appalling, inhuman and degrading living conditions and for human rights’ abuses (Amnesty International, 2010, 2012a, Carr, 2012, 2015). Pagani was condemned as the worst detention centre in Europe during 2009, “worst than Dante’s inferno” (sic) (Carr, 2015, p. 94; Sarantidis, 2018). The living conditions there were so appalling that the European Court of Human Rights (2011) ruled that they “violated the very meaning of human dignity”. In 2010, Frontex’s Deputy Executive Director described Greece as the “hottest area of illegal immigration in Europe” (Carr, 2015, p. 88). Evros River, the natural border between Turkey and Northern Greece, became an enormous graveyard for hundreds of border crossers. This period was also framed as a “humanitarian crisis” (Pro Asyl, 2014). Greece has been a major entry point for border crossers since the 1990s, when hundreds of thousands of Albanian border crossers arrived in the Greek mainland, in the aftermath of the collapse of the pyramid banking system in Albania (Baldwin-Edwards, Kyriakou, Kakalika, & Katsios, 2004; Dalakoglou, 2016). Moreover, from the early 2000s onwards, Greece and particularly Lesvos was an important gateway for border crossers coming from Asian and African countries, as documented by academics (Georgoulas & Sarantidis, 4 (Unformatted version, page numbers not final)