Drawing the Future in the Ashes: The Ruins of Moria and the Materiality of Migration

By Yannis Hamilakis (Brown University)

It is the silence that I recall most from that day in early October 2020, when I visited the ruins of Moria. The uncanny and strange silence of the place that I remembered so alive and so full of buzz. January 2020 it was, when I was here last. The soundscape then was very different. I recall the winter sun; I still hear the sound of an ax falling on olive trees. It was a rare sunny interval in the midst of the winter, and people were out chopping firewood. Children were out, too, playing, their voices still in my ears. I recall how stunned I was then, when I realized the extent of the Moria settlement (Hamilakis 2022). It had covered not only the “Olive Grove” or “Jungle” areas to the east of the walled compound but all the hills around it, to its north and west, extending way back from the main road and entrance, and high up the hill. It had even nearly reached the area where asylum seekers from central Africa, Christians, used to find refuge, their own Mount of Olives, to perform their ceremonies, to send to the skies their chanting. It was a peaceful place up there, back in 2017. Not so in late 2019 and 2020.

Now, instead of chopped firewood and children’s voices, mostly silence. Silence that was, however, punctuated by strange noises: dog noises, cat noises. I then remembered that the settlement of 20,000 people had attracted many stray cats and dogs, and I recalled that they were fed by the inhabitants, shared in some of the food their human neighbors struggled to prepare every day. They also often enjoyed the lion’s share from the camp food prepared by the subcontracted catering company, food that was mostly rejected by humans, as they found it inedible. The millions of euros that centralized food provision contract, ill-spent, the mountain of wasted food, the animals that it attracted from nearby: the migration industry and its multispecies entanglements. I know for a fact that, of those cats and dogs, some had been adopted by asylum seekers themselves; strong bonds must have been created, echoing Manus Island and its dogs in the stories narrated by Behrouz Boochani (2021). Some of these animals must have left with the Moria inhabitants, in those terrible nights and days of September, when they gathered what they could and abandoned the burning camp. But most animals stayed behind. They belonged to the place. They have been here, hungry for almost a month now. And they were wandering around. The barking was penetrating, sad, terrible. I hear that some asylum seekers and people from the town were touched by their plight and have come here to feed them. But it’s not enough, and it has been almost a month. Suddenly, as we were walking the cement road up the hill on the eastern side, we heard loud noises and saw inside the fenced compound a pack of angry dogs ferociously chasing a frightened cat in and out of the burnt and ravaged containers. “They are going to kill her, they are gonna eat her,” G. said, agitated, and rushed to chase them away. . . . And what happened to the bird that was kept in this burnt cage?

But there were some human noises, too. Occasionally, a group of young people, most likely volunteers for migrant support NGOs, would wander, like us, among the ruins and stop and comment at specific spots. A heritage space already? No, more likely a landscape of ruination, suspended between two temporal states, a landscape going through the time of agony (Gonzalez-Ruibal 2014), not a living site, nor a mummified heritage locale. What is to happen to this place? If the government authorities have their way, it will become a park (a park?), so the urbanite conservative prime minister said, or it will be planted again with olive trees, so another politician said. Erasure by nature seems to be the site’s fate, desired by people in high places, oblivious perhaps to the persistence and resilience of material memory.

There were other human voices, too, more animated, from people indifferent to our presence, hard at work, eager to get going: a large group of men, women, and children, many possibly from the Roma community, but not only, coming to take things away, to scavenge for scrap metal and other usable and recyclable things. They were working primarily inside the walled compound where most metal could be found; the meager materials of the encampment around it, mostly wood, stone, plastic sheets and tarp, and water bottles, were of less interest to them.

D. wanted to show me the new location of the school and the art studio operated by the Wave of Hope for the Future, the self-help mutual-aid initiative started by Afghani people and with whom I collaborated in the staging of the Transient Matter exhibition (Hamilakis 2021; see contribution by Farzad). I recalled my last visit to the school, the community library, and the studio, crammed in the “Jungle,” between closely spaced habitation tents and a mosque. Later in 2020, I saw in their Facebook posts that they were building a new, larger one in the area behind the walled compound. D. tells me that it was because the large NGO that was in charge of the “Olive Grove” and “Jungle” areas, wanted them out. As we reached the spot, the traces were unmistakable: a large pile of white ash where the library was, many burnt acrylic paint tubes and metal cases containing paintbrushes where the art studio once stood, and the large, rectangular empty space where the schoolrooms were.

“There was another, more clandestine school, at the edge of the camp,” D. says, and he was keen to show it to me. I had not heard of this, but it was apparently run by a sole woman from Afghanistan, and it was possibly more religiously oriented than the clearly secular operation of the school of the Wave of Hope for the Future. We found it: a small shack, possibly four by three meters, with some exercise notebooks scattered on the floor.

As I was walking on, I realized that we were now gaining access to areas and spaces that we, white men, “locals” of sorts, could never possibly have had while the camp was in operation. I had been inside tents a couple of times, cordially invited by their inhabitants, but we would mostly sit at the courtyard outside or in communal areas, talk, and share food. Now, we could walk into any space. It felt wrong. It felt voyeuristic at times. In most cases, however, we did not have to enter an enclosed space, especially in the areas outside the walled compound. Now, the area was mostly a vast open-air ruin, an archaeological site with the walls and the roofs of the structures missing, but with the layout, the foundations, intact. A perfect site plan to “read.” The canonical rectangular shape of the wooden pallets laid on the floor for drainage gave the landscape the features of an urban grid, designed according to the principles of the Hippodamian system. Features that were not known to an outside observer, now they were revealing themselves to us: interior hearths, sunken pits, enclosed outdoor toilets, laid interior floors, and sleeping platforms. It is as if the place became more “readable,” better understood as a ruin, an example perhaps of what Yael Navaro calls (2020) a “negative methodology.”

The objects, the ruined structures, the humble materials were revealing themselves now in their gutted, more intimate, raw state. In a way, these are stories in wood and stone and plastic, not in any metaphorical sense but in a directly physical, material, tangible, and experiential sense. Stories that were not spoken by the inhabitants; they were not uttered because they were not meant to be. Their purpose was endurance and survival. Shelters had to be built and hearths and ovens constructed; interiors organized in the most inventive and ingenious senses; cooking and eating for sustenance, for memory, for self-affirmation, for self-dignity, for community, had to be arranged. Material stories about labor, determination, resilience. Material stories about fear and violence, too: the makeshift toilets, dug on the ground in and around tents, visible and exposed now in this ruinous landscape, speak of the lack of proper sanitation, but they also speak of the fear that women and other groups in vulnerable positions felt in walking, especially at night, to the few poorly maintained toilets provided by the authorities. Stories of earth and stone and wood, stories of bodies in segregation. To be sure, writing was done, too; painting, music, and even short films were produced; stories were narrated. But this landscape of ruins is the most affective and evocative story of all, painful and fascinating at the same time.

D. wanted to show me the stone theater built by volunteers in an area that was meant to be for play and children’s activities. But then something else caught our eye: a series of identical wooden shacks, clearly marked with blue paint and numbered, some complete, some half-built. A paper sign on one of the doors read, “Discard PPE before entering.” It was a COVID isolation clinic, the construction of which was interrupted by the fire. Greece as a whole went through various lockdowns and reopenings since March 2020, but Moria, along with other migrant camps, was in complete and permanent lockdown and strict quarantine since then. Its residents were not allowed to move out of it, even for their basic shopping. The camp stayed free of COVID until the end of the summer of 2020, and then, six days before the fire, the first confirmed case was announced: a Somali man who was allowed to travel to the mainland, left for Athens, but returned after a month, unable to find work and support there. He was not the only one; hundreds of them were forced to return. Moria was a hell for its inhabitants, but better the hell they knew and the one where they could rely on communal effort, self-organizing, and volunteer support. Soon after, the COVID cases multiplied. According to media reports and interlocutors, one possible scenario is that the fire started when the authorities wanted to remove infected people out of the camp, not to an isolation hospital ward or a hotel, but to a warehouse nearby.

“Anthropila,” D. muttered, more than once, meaning the odor of humanness; this palpable ruin was clearly too intense, too real, too affectively close. As we walked past a “bakery quarter” of sorts, the area where the sunken bread ovens were concentrated, we decided to enter the walled compound, the area that, when the camp was in operation, was closely guarded by the police, by the army, by Group G4S, by NGO volunteers, you name it. It is a strange feeling that we could walk around, in and out of containers and office buildings between razor-wired fences and ominous signs, uninhibited. But the burnt materiality here affects us in different ways: wood and stone and plastic outside; deformed metal, shattered glass, and tossed-down office furniture here. This is more brutal, uglier, and the layer upon layer of razor wire, indestructible, blackened at times, but its punitive, bloody potential still there.

The offices of the Reception and Identification Center, abandoned in haste. Metal filing cabinets overturned, loose papers all over. Among them, handwritten transcripts from interviews. In this one, taken by the Greek Red Cross. F., from Cameroon, a twenty-nine-year-old woman asylum seeker, interviewed in 2017, a woman who traveled through Guinea and Turkey, who can speak French and Spanish, and who declares Greece as her desired destination. Then, a detailed “social history” (koinoniko istoriko), written in blue pen, narrating death, imprisonment, sexual violence: a life in fragments, scattered among the ruins. These interviews would have probably been transferred into digital form, or maybe the case was resolved one way or another, or both. A life deemed of lesser importance, hence Moria. A narrated life on paper, left behind, exposed, not worthy of collection, protection, curation.

I had been in this office once before. It was in 2017, during a short conversation with the commander-in-chief of the camp. I recall his whiteboard, where he used to write the daily numbers of inhabitants. This is that whiteboard, on the last day, the day of the fire. The bureaucratic logic, desperate to map, account, categorize, maintain the illusion of control. The main nationalities also recorded in percentages: Afghani 77%, Syrian 8%, DRC 7%, Other 8%. It says 12,768, the total number of people, with hyperoptimistic accuracy. Yet, after the fire, the tally would not match, with as many as 2,000 people “missing.” Under “Departures from Moria,” it is noted with blue, “one death.” And someone who was here after the fire and before us jammed the figures, effaced the officialdom of the board, inflated the numbers, especially in the “protected status” sectors, and scribbled “Lesvos” across the board.

In the unaccompanied minors sector, scattered educational materials on the floor and a short guide on the prehistoric archaeological site of Thermi in Lesvos. Was it provided by a teacher staff member? Was it picked up by one of the young inhabitants during one of their rare supervised sightseeing visits (see contribution from Pavlou)?

The vandalized ATM was installed in the few months before the fire, since, with the COVID crisis as a pretext, no migrants were allowed to visit the town to withdraw the small amounts that the UNHCR offers. In front of the asylum service buildings, which had been blazed more than once in the past in revolts and uprisings, I remember seeing groups of people with papers in hand pushing against its razor-wired entrance. I also recalled that an emergency exit for the asylum personnel was constructed behind this building, including a wooden bridge across the stream, guarded by Group G4S staff: this building, in particular, was the target of many revolts in the past. Now, at long last, I had the chance to inspect its fence from up close. It was only then that I realized that it was a double fence, creating a cordon sanitaire, a buffer zone of sorts in the middle, and that it was only through a small rectangular opening that asylum seekers were able to push the papers through, minimizing any intimate bodily contact.

I am writing these lines in Athens, a few months after the October 2020 visit. Yesterday, on a side street wall, I saw this poster:

Moria, even as a ruin, perhaps especially as a ruin, travels. The text is part of the lyrics from the song “Vertigo Ft. Sponty” by the punk-rap-metal group Krav Boca, which sings it in Greek and French.

Here is how they translate that part themselves:

Struggles are my friend’s homeland

They draw their future with ashes from Moria

Damascus—Aegean—Hotspot—Athens—Central Square of Victoria

We carry stories and thorns in our feet.

An itinerary of migration, stories in transit, the sound of hope. Here is the full song:

Drawing the future with ashes. At Moria, what was burnt was much more than the largest migrant camp in Europe. Moria was a ruin foretold (cf. Hamilakis 2016); its burning had been predicted and announced several times over, including in the smaller fires that had engulfed the camp in migrant revolts, in the past five years. But in its ashes we can see clearly, more clearly now than before, the face of Europe, of the Global North with its so-called migration crises; we can trace the contours and feel the texture of the new global apartheids (cf. Besteman 2019). In the meantime, others will draw in these ashes the shapes of their futures.

Postscript

A week after I completed this piece, in March 2021, D. sent me pictures of the Moria camp. We were planning to return with a team and do a “proper” recording of the ruins. “Nothing left,” D. said. The buildings are leveled, and only the “Pre-Departure Center,” the high-security prison, was left. Nothing left? I doubt it. Matter endures, things last, the rot remains. I went back; there was still much to see and reflect on.

Yannis Hamilakis is a Jouwkosky Family Professor of Archaeology and Professor of Modern Greek Studies at Brown University.

Acknowledgments

D. and G. for their companionship, passion, and love. The people-on-the-move, in Lesvos and elsewhere, solidarity, and thank you! Maria Choleva, Eva Mol, and Katerina Rozakou for keen observations and comments.

REFERENCES CITED

Besteman, Catherine. 2019. “Militarized global apartheid”. Current Anthropology 60: S26-S38.

Boochani, Behrouz. 2021. “The Black One.” Newsroom. https://www.newsroom.co.nz/dogs-an-essay-by-behrouz-boochami.

González-Ruibal, Alfredo. 2014. “Returning to Where We Have Never Been: Excavating the Ruins of Modernity.” In Ruin Memories, Materialities, Aesthetics and the Archaeology of the Recent Past, edited by B. Olsen and P. Pétursdóttir, 367–89. London: Routledge.

Hamilakis, Yannis. 2016. “The EU’s Future Ruins: Moria Refugee Camp in Lesbos.” The Nation, April 15. https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/the-eus-future-ruins-moria-refugee-camp-in-lesbos/.

Navaro, Yael. 2020. “The Aftermath of Mass Violence: A Negative Methodology.” Annual Review of Anthropology 49:161–73.

Hamilakis, Yannis. 2021. “The Redistribution of the Sensible: Photography and Contemporary Migration.” In Pearls, Politics and Pistachios. Essays in Anthropology and Memories on the Occasion of Susan Pollock’s 65th Birthday, edited by Herausgeber*innenkollektiv, 665–82. Berlin: Ex Oriente.

Hamilakis, Yannis. 2022. “Border Assemblages between Surveillance and Spectacle: What Was Moria and What Comes After?” American Anthropologist 124 (1).