737 Cheliotis in 1798 by Ottoman Turkish authorities (Athens News, 28 April 2011). That sum was close to one-third of the total annual funds the Greek state allocated at the time to the operation of detention and reception centres for irregular migrants (e.g. to cover costs relating to food, medication, hygiene, clothing and transportation). It would also have been singly sufficient to support for a year the running of detention and reception centres in at least nine out of the twelve prefectures of the country involved (see further Epikaira, 3 February 2011). Greece has additionally had access to substantial EU funding for immigration and asylum management, at least some of which could have been used to ease pressures on immigration detention centres (e.g. through supporting NGOs that operate shelters for asylum seekers). Yet the Greek state has long made particularly limited use of such funding possibilities (UNHCHR, 3 December 2012), not to mention that it has typically also failed to explore cost-effective alternatives (e.g. using empty hospitals to house vulnerable irregular migrants; see e.g. FRA, 2011). In 2012, EU funding was made available specifically for supporting infrastructure projects (i.e. renovation, refurbishment or construction of facilities) and running costs relating to detention centres, so as to help member states ‘improve the reception conditions in detention facilities’ (IPS, 17 March 2013). To what extent, and in what ways, these funds will be utilised by the Greek state may be somewhat early to judge, yet the first signs are far from encouraging. At the same time that independent reports about persistently substandard detention conditions keep being published, Greek authorities appear to have given priority to the expansion, through construction work, of the number of centres around the country, which cannot in itself suffice to guarantee better conditions of detention. Indeed, insofar as their official classification might provide an indication of what new centres will be like on the ground, it is important to note that the majority of them have clearly been referred to in government documentation as places of detention rather than reception (ICJ and ECRE, 2013), although there is no plan in sight to drop the term ‘philoxenia’ from the formal name of centres categorised as detention sites. At least as far as the new reception centres are concerned, Minister Dendias has stated that those to be located on the islands of Samos and Chios (in spaces that have been used before for holding irregular migrants) are in the process of being ‘perfected’ (SKAI, 4 October 2012), whilst the centre scheduled to operate in Orestiada ‘will be the most modern in the whole of Europe’ (Proto Thema, 12 April 2013). It is not clear, however, how the concepts of ‘perfect’ and ‘modern’ will be interpreted and applied in practice, and whether they will be treated as loosely and perversely as the notion of philoxenia has been treated to date. Nor, equally, can one be sure that Greek authorities will objectively evaluate detention conditions according to commonly accepted European understandings and standards, or that they will allow themselves to perceive and engage with possible external criticism on its own terms and merits. As well as repudiating condemnations as such, the Greek state is also known to have denied negative assessment by twisting it into approval. In late 2012, Greece submitted an official report to the Secretariat of the Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe regarding the ‘living conditions of illegal migrants [o]n the border of Evros and in Athens’, where it was stated that the detention centre in Amygdaleza had recently been found by the UN High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) to be ‘exemplary as regards Downloaded from euc.sagepub.com at Oxford University Libraries on November 25, 2013