Throughout history the vulnerability of this piece of coastline has been unusual even by the standards of the region. It is the reason why the Byzantines, Ottomans and others all battled for these islands and held them at different times. From the northernmost parts of the island of Lesbos you can see Turkey clearer than most Greek islands are visible one to another. Five miles of water is all that divides this portion of Europe from Turkey. You can see why the people-smugglers get away with telling their charges that the final stretch of their journey into Europe consists of crossing a river. With a shorter journey time than the one from North Africa to Lampedusa, the going rate for the final part of this journey into Europe is $1,500. In the winter when the waters can get rough some of those lured to the shore see the rickety vessel they are being offered and refuse to get in. They are told that if they do not get in then they will still have to pay their $1,500, followed by another $1,500 for the boat they do get in.

Once they are pushed off from the shore, the boats take between 90 minutes and two hours to reach Greece. Unlike the smugglers from Libya into Italy, the people-smugglers of Turkey do not bother to use wooden vessels for such a short crossing. Their preferred boats are plastic ones, and unlike the great funeral pyres of wooden boats intermittently burned on Lampedusa, these plastic vessels cannot be burnt. Nor can they be recycled on the island, so cheap is the type of plastic they are made from. And so intermittently great piles of these plastic boats are collected and sent by a bigger boat to the Greek mainland for recycling. But of course the boats can still go down, in good weather and bad.

As with the inhabitants of Lampedusa, throughout all the years that the world took no interest in the locals on these Greek islands, they responded with a similar sense of charity and history, aware not just of what was happening now, but also of their own history. Many of the families on these islands have their own memories of migration. When the Greco-Turkish war ended in 1922 these islands were flooded with Greek citizens fleeing Asia Minor. More than three million Greeks fled what is now Turkey, via islands like Lesbos where today one in three residents is descended from those refugees. On the days when the ‘river’ between Turkey and Lesbos is dotted with boats like a low-key Armada, one of the first sites many of the migrants see is the tiny village of Skala Skamnias on the northern coast of Lesbos. Its tiny port, with a couple of bar-restaurants hugging the water and its tiny chapel on the harbour’s promontory, was founded by some refugees from 1922.