Moria Bye Bye, My Friend

By George Tyrikos-Ergas

This is a piece of fiction. The author wishes to dedicate it to Yannis Hamilakis and Dionysis Paulou for once walking with him “upon the ruins of Jerusalem.”

Photograph by G. Tyrikos-Ergas, October 3, 2020.

You could doubt a lot of things about Moria camp, Lesvos, Greece, in the years of our Lord somewhere from 2015 to 2020. You can still debate, ponder, wonder, stay there yonder, and steadily marvel. What happened there? What was it? Sure thing. But there is something you just couldn’t doubt. A universal truth acknowledged by all ethnicities lingering in Moria mud: Algerians, Congolese, Syrians, Afghanis, you name it. And this truth is that there was not a single place in Lesvos that served a filthier yet tastier kebab with French fries and ketchup than Maria’s makeshift canteen, just by the southern fence. Not a single place. Admitting otherwise was blasphemy. Especially in front of the almighty Maria, who would ask us, from time to time, the same thing. She would loom above us holding the tray, a strong woman, a fearless woman who dared taking on local, small-scale Afghani mafias that offered protection, a champion of grease and fried pans gurgling, she would loom alright. And before landing the food with an ominous thud, just like this legendary mermaid lady asking poor seafarers if Alexander the Great is still alive, she would ask: “And tell me boys with your little willies, have you ever eaten a tastier kebab?” Of course, we hadn’t. Best deep-frozen kebab, non-brand-name fries, and long-passed-expiration-date gone-sour ketchup. She had given a name to the only dish she served: “heart attack.” And she would serve tea with sugar. Tons of sugar. She named that “insulin.” And she would serve Coca-Cola, boiling hot in summer. She would name them “whores.”

That day, it was on me. I would buy my guys lunch. Four heart attacks, three whores, and an insulin were hesitantly ordered. “Go to hell,” Maria responded. Ok, she had heard us. In the sack, made by every kind of driftwood, dirty crates, and UNHCR-branded torn sheds, customers would sit on the floor on some improvised, cracking seat, on the counter, on one another, and they would cry their lungs out. Refugees, immigrants, cops, NGOs, discord and yet comfort, somehow.

It was me, a Greek in Greece; Mohammad from Syria; Sidiki from Afghanistan; and Illo from Congo. It would be our last meeting, but we didn’t know that then. These three were the so-called leaders of their communities in Moria camp. Mohammad was an elected leader, a city counselor back home, a good speaker and an even better listener. He organized the elections himself in Moria camp; it was only fair. Sidiki tirelessly worked his way to the top of hierarchy, meddling in almost anything with his unending energy, and thus silently treated as the spokesperson of the Afghan community. “If I don’t do a thousand things every day in this place,” he’d say, “I will go mad.” Illo, on the other hand, “knifed his way” to leadership and clung there with the help of the Algerian gangs and the block-C inmates. Leader of the bad apples, he said. “Rotten, Giorgos, rotten like your Christian soul eternal,” he’d laugh. He’d laugh the same laugh whether he was being beaten down with sticks or merrily drinking his “insulin.”

Mohammad and Sidiki wouldn’t normally speak to each other. Not in friendly, eating-around-the same-table terms. Afghans and Syrians had a lot of issues. Syrians would blame Afghans, saying that they weren’t proper refugees, since their country didn’t have war officially, and then Afghans would freak out about this because Afghanistan today is a pit in hell nevertheless, and they would react violently whenever the state or an NGO would openly favor Syrians over Afghans in all sorts of minor and major ways. These two leaders now wouldn’t talk to Illo, anyway, because for them Africa was the great and the feared and the what-are-they-doing-here-anyhow people. Plus, they considered most Africans uncivilized thugs. If anything else, Westerners and Middle Easterners in Moria would more often than not share the same prejudice against “Blacks.”

But hey, these three were leaders, and they more or less liked me, and, well, I guess as leaders they couldn’t just stab or curse each other all the time. They could also talk things over occasionally. I would help, mostly fail, lose them for weeks, then I would persuade them to meet again, somewhere around these lines. I hated being the broker; it made me look wise and great and appreciated by all when, in truth, I was as desperate and angry and fed up as anyone. And I had no answers—nobody really had any. Perhaps someone did, but I never met them.

Maria came and sat with us. Before sitting down on a bench made out of the logs of an olive tree, she yelled to the general public that went instantly silent: “You all, no orders, now I sit down to rest, ok?” She added a swear word or two in Greek and patted me on the back.

“So, professor, instead of pleasing your wife you are still here today to save the clandestines?” She used the word lathrometanastes for “clandestines,” a demeaning word used by neo-Nazis and fascists and conservatives all over Greece. Illo nodded and laughed; he never liked the word, but hey, that was Maria speaking.

“You are laughing, my blackie? One day, those Morian villagers you threatened the other day will beat your carcass back to the sea, mind my words. You didn’t drown then, you will now. You must respect them, you are in their country.”

“I respect, they respect me? Found Takino alone in the village at night, fella was just passing by, came back in blood, still in hospital, Maria,” he replied. “Marakimou” he added in Greek, laughing, “my little Maria.”

“Everyone still likes you here Maria,” said I. “All call you Maraki and mama-Maria.”

“I am making money, they can call me whatever.”

“Come on mama-Maria,” said Mohammad, “you are a gift from Allah, your kind heart. Three euros per portion, fifty cents the tea, that’s nothing. What money? You will go to heaven, you serve the poor here. Not a store this one, It is . . . a . . .”

Sidiki added the word Muhammad tried to find. An Arabic word on which the two agreed, adding some praise upon the Prophet, or so I thought. Something from the Holy Book, their common reference point. Last time they even exchanged a word was when Moria camp was partially burned; they yelled terrible threats at each other then, putting the blame on one another’s community. Sidiki had Muhammad by the throat, but they were separated by riot police, both beaten unconscious.

“So why did you bring the big heads together Georgie?” asked Maria.

“No real reason, Maria. COVID measures will only get more and more strict, and soon I will not be able to come around these places as a volunteer. I don’t belong to any official thing, I got no official reason to be here if the quarantine gets serious. I will be able to send some supplies, but every week like now? I don’t think I will be able to come.”

Sidiki looked worried. “Think so? Not many COVID cases in Lesvos, though. More in Athens, here just one or two I have heard?”

“There are lockdowns all over the world. In Italy things have gone mad. . .”

“Imagine covid comes here? In this camp?” said Muhammad. “My God have mercy. No true running water for what, twenty thousand? No toilet facilities. No electricity. Tents so close to each other, people like packed mice in a nest. How you stop that when it comes here? You can’t.”

Illo was smirking. “At least you have some water taps, friend. Some running water, sometime of the day. You have a hole to shit. Ever visited up? Pakistani, Morocco, Congo section? The only running water is piss from my thing there! Ah yes, and water from the rain under my tent. You know, like small river under the planks, you can see it, romantic stuff. Sometimes, shit flows down from the upper parts too. With rain. No? Your women also, see, have safe containers with children and guards. Our women?”

“Very few, very few,” opposed Muhammad, “have this. Only those without men.”

“Well ok, we have none of this.”

“Perhaps you should prepare something,” I said. “You know, talk to NGOs, talk to the authorities in your weekly gathering to provide something. Prepare. Like masks, soap, hand disinfectants, you know, small bottles of disinfectant, ask for them. I think they will do something, no? They must have understood that if COVID comes to Lesvos for good, you cannot have a camp of twenty thousand in this mess, and get away with less than a terrible disaster. People will fall like flies. I think they already know it.”

Maria burst out laughing. “You are a big malakas Georgie” she said in Greek. Sure, everyone understood “malakas,” the most famous swearword in this part of the planet. But nobody laughed or anything. They were silent. They understood more than just a word.

A few months passed. COVID did come. Rumors spread that they would lock everyone in the camp for quarantine. Some workers started strengthening the fences.

Things were afoot. Something was stirring. Unease. I felt the urge and wrote an article and published it in the local press, saying that locking down twenty thousand people in a camp during COVID would mean extermination. As always, I was late to warn, to lament, to try. Things would play out; they were already on their way. The fate of every such a place. Burn down to ashes.

Who did it? Why? I think the place did it to itself. But that’s just a poet’s or a philosopher’s reckoning, totally worthless in official, state, or police terms.

The second-largest city in Lesvos, a place made of shit and garbage and scraps that locals were leaving behind, all that charity would spare and all that state tolerance would allow, things petty and things unnecessarily expensive, the activists’ terror and the fascists’ joy, the place the Western refugee industry cherished the most, Moria the purgatory, Moria the valley of untold suffering, the arena of despair and the birthplace of hope. All burned. Tents were burned. Improvised libraries, makeshift schools. Market alleys, biochemical toilets, playgrounds. Glass turned into liquid, olive trees to charcoal. It was the biggest and most complete fire of all. Moria camp was no more. Evaporated.

Everyone took to the streets. Thousands of people with nowhere to live. Controlled chaos had now become chaos unleashed. Everything happened then: neo-Nazis patrolling the streets alongside cops, NGO members beaten up, reporters beaten up, and of course, refugees beaten the hell up. Locals in solidarity would help, hesitantly, always looking behind their back. They were beaten up, as well. Then they made this other camp. A thousand times worse than Moria. Just tents and mud. In the worse possible spot one could pick, just by the sea, facing north. And winter has come, and life there is made from the fabric of nightmares.

The fire destroyed Maria’s canteen. I never heard from Illo again. Most likely he was the first to be blamed for arson and was taken to prison on mainland Greece. Sidiki is also nowhere to be found. Perhaps he managed to leave the island along with some thousands of others that had to be moved somewhere else. Mohammad called once, but he refused to tell me how he was and if he needed anything; he just wanted to know if I was ok. I was not. Well, there are worse things, he said. Yes my friend, there are.

George Tyrikos-Ergas is an anthropologist, an author, and an activist, living on Lesvos. He used to go fishing carefree, before the sea around his home island was filled with corpses and with their haunting memory. Email: tyrikos@hotmail.com.