Refuge in Lesvos

 SO! I am here, in Lesvos, having navigated a mildly whackadoo travel screwball en route (short version: ferry pushed back a day, leading to a three-flight changed itinerary to arrive on the island about 12 hours earlier than originally scheduled, with zero night spent sleeping on a boat) and that whole journey and some attendant travelogue/photography/videography is forthcoming once I get a few work-work odds-and-ends done (yes, I'm doing a little work on this leg of the trip in the hopes of fully unplugging weekends and even a full week or two later on). But first, after the jump, some key context on why I opted for Lesvos (or Lesbos, or Λέσβος, however you wanna roll with it). Spoiler alert: this is going to be one of those "hey, if you're flush with cash could you throw some bones to some good folk" deals? So DO THAT even if you couldn't POSSIBLY care less about why I'm on any particular island at any particular moment in time!

To start with the navelgazing "Pat's brain, oh no, not again" narrative:  it will, I think, surprise nobody who knows me to learn that my first move upon deciding to start my summer in Greece was "let's get extremely decision-fatigued immediately by deciding where to go besides Athens!" The thing is: I am not temperamentally a "let's go lie on a beach and read a book" vacationer, though I am working on exploring whether I might ever be capable of such a thing. And I would say about 90% of Greek island guidebooks go deep on, like, types of sand? And levels of beach organization? When really all I wanted to know was: where's the Greek island where it's all pretty and relatively unplugged and I can walk around some cute villages and you can actually connect with human beings but it's not swamped by cruise ship traffic and also there's good food but also maybe a beach is okay also can I do this without a car, I hate cars, where's the island with no cars, oh no I'm spiraling, help. (It did not help that just about everyone I know who has gone, and every guidebook as well, has said Santorini is Genuinely So Great and Also Awful and You Should Go but Also It's Bad. Thanks, everybody and also guide book authors!)

Eventually I got over myself (we call this "growth") by saying: let's pretend this is standing in for a weeklong Florida beach hotel with books and a towel and umbrella, and that is the only bar you have to clear. If you don't LOVE the island you pick, it will (probably??) be better than the equivalent-priced Howard Johnson's in uhhh I dunno Fort Myers or wherever, and you will legally be allowed to return to Greece to try again (maybe).

Having turned that corner, I pretty quickly started thinking a lot about Lesvos. I didn't know anybody who'd been here personally, but the writing about it that I found tended to thematically return to a few central ideas: it's less touristed than the other major islands (not being very island-hopping friendly; it's really mostly useful as a day-trips-to-Turkey type launching pad in that sense), it's affordable and lo-fi, people who come here tend to want to come back and stay longer, and (key for that old demon But What About A Sampler Platter who lives in my brain) it's a large and varied enough island that you can find a few different vibes depending on where you base yourself, though (unlike Crete) you never lose sense of the fact that you're on an island. Well: that sounded... good?

What sealed the deal, though, was reading this in Rough Guide's Greece guidebook: "Visitor numbers have declined of late, especially since the arrival of refugees from the nearby Turkish shore accelerated in 2015." As an online author writing about Lesvos framed it, travel to Lesvos in the era of refugee crises is in fact a way to put your money where your mouth is, spending money in a community that has gone above and beyond to care for refugees largely fleeing regions that United States military caprice has turned into a collection of nightmares, and that has largely been rewarded by a decline in tourism.

Matteo Nucci's "Lands of Migration" (published in the excellent compendium The Passenger: Greece, about which I'll have more to say in a future post) digs deep on the refugee crisis here, kickstarted by a bureaucratically vile agreement between Turkey and the EU to allow refugees who reach the shores of Greek islands to stay there, but to go no further until their refugee status has been resolved, with full knowledge that each refugee's process will likely take years if they ever see it conclude. The vision, as it was for Orbán's Hungary, or the noxious immigration policies we have in America, was to make the thought of border crossing so dangerous and inhumane as to dissuade people fleeing genocide, war, destruction of their homeland. Beyond the obvious moral depravity of the policy, it also betrays a thuggish stupidity about human nature, assuming that refugees must be making the decision to flee their homelands lightly enough that camp detention would be enough to change their minds.

Regardless, as Nucci beautifully details, Lesvians spat in the eye of the EU's strategem, going out of their way to make an inhospitable situation more livable, quickly organizing charities and common help networks to feed, clothe, and shelter migrants whose numbers quickly outstripped the habitable maximum for their assigned camps. This may have something to do with the island's longstanding left-wing bona fides; it regularly sends socialists to Greece's legislature, and you see antifascist graffiti all over, sometimes towering several stories tall on buildings across the island. For Nucci, it's also down to Greek - and particularly island-dwelling Greek - identity being rooted in forced migrations and sea voyages, leading to a strong ethos of philoxenia - friendship toward strangers, exhibited from the earliest oral Greek epics down to contemporary aid organizations.

Three organizations that are still engaged in the work, from what I've read, are A Drop in the Ocean, One Happy Family, and Lesvos Solidarity. I'm pleased that Moon Guides specifically urges visitors to donate or volunteer with these organizations; since they, like most aid groups, prefer "voluntourists" who can commit at least a month's work, I recommend any of y'all who may decide to come to Lesvos for a briefer window of time, as have I, donate instead.

To answer the question that usually gets asked once people hear this context: the island feels incredibly safe. It's a series of small, tight-knit communities (only one town has over 10,000 residents) and while there has of course been some documented crime related to the refugees, my experience (granted, just a couple days old) has been that you don't feel it at all. There are signs of that world being negotiated, of course - just as, hearteningly, you see a growing multicultural mix in Mytlini in particular (from what little I saw in my time there on arrival). But as usual, the hatemongers and race-baiters have it wrong: you don't have to be ruled by fear! Come visit The Nice Island, in my opinion!

Anyhow, that's the too-long narrative of Why Lesvos, primarily shared in the hopes that those of you looking to throw a little coin at worthy causes might add these to your rotation. (Remember: I've always got my staple donation faves linked to the right on the desktop version of the blag!) I would likely have come here regardless, for all the reasons I outline above. But it's a genuine treat to get to be a part of tourism returning to this island - not a sensation I often feel, frankly.

I'll have much more to say about Lesvos once my week here has concluded (and may have a word or two along the way, depending on how Extremely Online I end up being, never stop posting). My experience here, to be clear, has been much more unplug-relax-be-in-the-moment than this post's focus implies, and I'll have a bit to say on what that has looked like, and what you might experience if you decide to swing up thisaways. All that n more, once I have eaten another barrel of fish, finished a stack of school work, and slept for approximately one hundred years!