One cold night in spring, around 1 am we left Çanakkale for the shore. We were 26, maybe 28 people. The youngest of us was a baby of maybe one year and the oldest was a sixty year old grandma. I think we were about ten women, ten children and five or six men. I was traveling with my seventeen year old brother. In our taxi we were seven people. After around three hours we arrived in a forest, where we had to hide for 24 hours with no food or water. The next day at 3 am we tried to cross with a small green dinghy. I don’t know how many meters long it was but the dinghy was so small that there was not enough space for everyone, and some people had to sit on the edges of the boat. We were at sea for three hours. As the weather was very cold, the children were shaking. I don’t know which island we were going to, I just knew we were going to Greece. Around six in the morning, two white and gray vessels showed up from afar. Later I would learn that this was the Hellenic Coast Guard. In each vessel were four or five masked men and women standing on deck with long metal rods and big guns. They were so young, between 25 to 35 years old.
As soon as they arrived they started to beat us. We were shouting and asking for help. One child, maybe 3 years old, was so afraid that he kept screaming and saying the only English sentence he knew: “I LOVE YOU”. I wanted to laugh but when I saw how scared he was, I felt sick to my stomach, and started vomiting. I couldn’t stop throwing up for the next two hours.
The two Greek vessels were ramming our dinghy and the masked men and women were beating up everyone, especially the person next to the engine. My 17 year old brother also got injured. The dinghy was full of water and one side broke when their boat hit us on the side. After maybe ten minutes one guy in our boat took out his phone and started filming. He was filming and shouting at them that they would to kill us, he said to us this would be the only way to stop them. Two more men started filming. One of them stood up and put his phone in front of his face. The vessels went back. They seemed to be really scared of the camera. But suddenly they made a big turn around us, got closer again and hit the guys who were filming with the metal rods and their phones fell into the sea. After some minutes one of the vessels left and the other one got very close and one of the masked men cut the engine and threw it into the sea. After this one of the Coast Guard boats tied our dinghy to their vessel and started towing us back to Turkey. Almost 30 minutes later, they stopped and left us at the sea. Our boat was taking water. They left very fast, and we couldn’t see anything. The sun was coming up slowly, and after fifteen minutes we saw a Turkish Coast Guard vessel from afar. They saw us too and they came very quickly to take us. I am sure that if they had arrived five minutes later, we would have drowned. All this time I was very sick and hardly understood what was happening around me. I was thinking if I got drowned here I wouldn’t even struggle. The Turkish Coast Guard took us in their vessel and for one hour we were inside. They drove us back to the shore of Balıkesir. Many more people were there who have been just pushed back like us from different locations.
Some time later we tried again and we made it after all.
| Stories of Resistance, Lesvos 2025 Despite blanket denials from Greek authorities, “pushbacks” in the Aegean Sea and Greece’ Evros border region are a horrifying reality. For years, the Legal Centre Lesvos has collected hundreds of testimonies of survivors of border violence. Together with Fitilia, over the next year we will publish a series of these anonymized* accounts, with the intention to show that behind every statistic, there is a person risking their life to reach Europe. While these stories highlight the brutality and violence of Greek and European border policies, they are also stories of resisting border regimes. They are a call to action – a stark reminder of the urgent need to continue the fight to dismantle the borders that surround us and with it the violence of Fortress Europe. *All identifying details, including names and exact dates have been removed, however, the stories published remain true to the survivors’ own accounts, and all have consented to the publishing of their testimonies. |