Yet although movement and migration has been the story of these islands for centuries, what has happened in recent years is new. Not just in the regularity with which the numbers of arrivals have kept rising, but in the places from which they come. Although few islanders insist on the distinction, these newcomers are not Greeks fleeing conflict abroad and returning home. They are people fleeing conflicts far away, often having passed through many safe countries in the process. They also include a growing number of people fleeing poverty, joblessness or a lack of prospects, and who see Europe as the answer to their problems and Greece as their way into Europe.

As with the Italian points of entry the flow into the Greek islands sped up in the wake of the ‘Arab Spring’ and in particular with the civil war in Syria. But, again as in Italy, the arrivals also came from further afield. From countries with insurgencies and unstable governments – not least Afghanistan – but also from countries that were allied to the European powers and with ostensibly stable governments, such as Pakistan. This flow of people who had made their way through four or five countries before getting to the launch sites on the shores of Turkey also came the long way around from Africa.

But even in Greece, where this tide of people had been coming for years, it was 2015 that changed everything. Not because of anything new that had happened in the Far East or Middle East or Africa, but because of something that happened far to the north, in Germany.

The broadcast news that told Africa and the Middle East about the life to be lived in Europe had also of course told Europeans about the lives of people in Africa and the Middle East. And few things made a greater impression on the evening television news than the stories of boats capsizing and sinking in the Mediterranean: the turning of the southern portion of Europe into a watery graveyard. After 2011 such stories of human misery that had already touched the hearts of those living in Italy and Greece slowly at first began to be noticed in the rest of Europe.