that accompanies the idea of Greece as the cultural cradle of the world; yet it is part of the country’s history. As a wall inscription in a detention centre on Lesvos seamlessly summarised ‘the truth may be bitter, but it must be told’ (Pro Asyl, 2007, p. 5). Modern Greece has been defined with the absence of migration history despite large scales of emigration from the country for nearly 100 years.34 On the contrary, Greekness is associated with persistence and continuity in space and time; thus, imagining modern Greece as an eternal and immobile space (Hamilakis, 2007; see also Triandafyllidou and Veikou, 2002).35 While this national narrative ‘resonated very well with proliferating nationalistic, xenophobic, and racist sentiments within Greek society’, it would be inevitably challenged by immigration and ethnic diversity (Lefkaditou, 2017, p. 335). The challenge became ever more apparent at the beginning of the 1990s, when immigration from neighbouring countries and the former Soviet Union acquired a more visible presence in Greek social life. Accusations of immigrants being “untrustworthy,” “lazy and deceitful by nature,” or “lazy and less intelligent than Greeks,” quickly gained ground, drawing their justification from both racial and cultural explanations with references to cultural inferiority, poverty and backwardness connected to immigrants’ homelands (Lawrence, 2005, p. 328).36 In fact, the wealth of unapologetic racist discourse in the 1990s was unlimited and came from every aspect of the political spectrum. This was further nurtured by the Greek media, which provided the stories ‘used to shape and naturalise Greek nativist racism’ (Lawrence, 2005, p. 328). Such xenophobic responses were deeply rooted in absolutist views of the essential purity of the “Greek race”, a sense of pride and superiority in the strength of a particular ethno-national culture, religion and language that has allegedly remained unspoiled for more than 2,000 years (Christou and King, 2006). Emigration from modern Greece dates back to the beginning of 1900s, when an estimated 420,000 left for overseas destinations, mainly the US (Fakiolas and King, 1996). During the post-war period and largely until the end of the military dictatorship in 1974, there was a more intense exodus, partly due to the socioeconomic and political situation of the country. According to available statistics, it is estimated that around 1.4 million people, 1 in 6 of the Greek population then, migrated to countries like Germany and Australia (Christou and King, 2006). 35 In ‘The Nation and its Ruins’, Yannis Hamilakis (2007) analyses the complexities of the Greek national imagination and how the key presence of the classical past in Greek national imagination has become naturalised and banal. 36 See also Lefkaditou (2017) who maps the different ways that race and racism operate in Greece. 34 66