The rocky coast of northeast Lesbos, an area near Efthalou, the site of many dinghy arrivals from Turkey, only five miles away by sea. The past three months have seen a mass arrival of thousands of traumatized refugees into Lesbos and to other Greek Aegean islands, challenging an already troubled economy and political balance of wills.
John Rudoff
A dinghy arrives on the northern shore of the Greek island of Lesbos. This arrival is composed predominantly of Syrians. Each arrival carries 40-50 people, who pay smugglers $1,200-$1,500 Euros each to supply them with a dinghy. The smugglers do not bring the refugees from Turkey to Greece; they simply point them towards Greece, turn on the outboard engine, and shove them into the sea.
John Rudoff
This dinghy's engine died and the boat started to deflate about 100 M offshore. The younger and stronger swimmers swam to shore so the sinking boat could stay afloat with the weaker ones, long enough to be pulled to shore. No one was injured here.
John Rudoff
A young woman shows the strain of the trip across Turkey and into the straits between Turkey and Greece
John Rudoff
A woman drags her child in a food basket. After getting to shore in north Lesbos, the refugees must traverse on foot a 60 km. Road to either the port town of Mytelini to register, or to the refugee camps. There are no reliable means of transport to accomplish this.
John Rudoff
The port of Mytilini is the site where refugees initially must register for identification with the port police. These facilities are utterly overwhelmed, having been designed for an occasional person, not arrivals of 2-3,000 people per day. Tensions are high about getting in to register, and these are exacerbated by religious differences between groups. Usually Afghan and Syrian-Iraqi groups lineup separately or on different days.
John Rudoff
Many people camp in pup-tents (which they buy from local suppliers) on the concrete seawall of the port, rather than stay in the more dangerous and primitive refugee camps.
John Rudoff
The refugee camp in Moria, which is occupied mostly by Afghanis and Somalis, is the rougher and more primitive of the two main camps. It is the site of a, EU high-security detention center, and, ironically, the people inside the detention center are in better conditions than the thousand or so camping around it.
John Rudoff
Afghan men line up for a possible food distribution by an NGO at Camp Moria, a refugee camp on Lesbos. Due to poor planning, shortly after this photo was made, a riot broke out and the food distribution vehicle made a hasty departure.
John Rudoff
The Greek government began chartering the largest ferry in its fleet of inter-island ferries, the Elefterios Venizelos, to bring refugees, 2,500 at a time, to Athens from the islands. This was because the isolated and small agricultural and tourist economies and facilities on Lesbos were unable to handle the thousands of refugees in any humane manner.
John Rudoff
When John Rudoff got off the ferry on the Greek island of Lesbos, he saw thousands and thousands of tents.
"People were literally camped out on every horizontal surface throughout Mitilini's harbor and ultimately the rest of the town," said Rudoff. Rudoff was in Lesbos to document the arrival of thousands of people fleeing conflict and deprivation in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan.
Rudoff was a cardiologist in Portland for 28 years, but has also always been a serious photographer. Now in his retirement, Rudoff wanted to help tell this important story.
"There were no toilets, there was one small tap that supplied running water," Rudoff said. "There were no shower facilities, and their only source of food was what they could buy from a small convenience store in the port."
The migrants were in Lesbos hoping to get official papers recognizing them as refugees. Officials on the island were overwhelmed by the number of people arriving at their doorsteps.
Rudoff said the migrants he talked to had paid smugglers between 1,000 and 1,500 Euros for passage to Greece. But they were not shepherded on their journey.
"They are quite literally put into a rubber raft which usually holds a roughly 20 horsepower ancient outboard motor on its transom and the smuggler will say, 'There's Greece, go!' and somebody will take the tiller of the engine and they'll go," he said.
Rudoff said the scale of the crisis was not clear to him until he was actually there. "People need to understand that this is not a couple of people sneaking across the Rio Grande. This is the migration of a population with a well founded fear of being destroyed."
