It is easier to scorn such decisions than it is to make them, and easier to make them than perhaps it should be. In each country the continent’s politicians were stuck in a moment akin to that of any person standing on a shoreline seeing a boat coming in. If the people in front of you are struggling to get ashore, the instinct of most observers – certainly most modern Europeans – would be to help those in difficulty to safety. Very few would push them back into the sea. Only months after saying that ‘politics was hard’ and trying to hold the line before the 14-year-old Lebanese girl, Angela Merkel had decided to show softness. Although her decision was taken on behalf of the continent rather than merely herself, the impulse she demonstrated was not an untypical one. The wish to welcome all comers ashore may not have been a natural compulsion throughout history, but it had become a natural one to Europeans now, and its opposite seemed unimaginable.

The inhabitants of Lesbos, like those of other islands, are a perfect example of this. Their main port – Mytilene – is one of the nearest ports to Turkey. At Mytilene too the migrant boats can see Europe in front of them when they set out. Illuminated and towering over the central point of the harbour is the dome of Saint Therapon, named after the bishop of Cyprus, massacred by the Arab Muslims as he said Mass in 632. Inside is the sarcophagus of Bishop Ignatios, a leading opponent of the Ottoman occupation in the nineteenth century. Along the port front are shops, bars and hotels including the Sappho Hotel, a name replicated everywhere on the island from which the ancient poetess came. With a population of 87,000, this is in size and population one of the bigger Greek islands. In the heat of the day, the smell of oil, fish and brackish water makes the vast harbour less appetising than it at first looks. But by evening, with a breeze, the port-front bars and cafes come alive and buzz as the sound systems pump out pop songs.

As in Lampedusa, the contrasts can be jarring. On the Italian island an aid-worker had described the occasional moments in the summer months when a boatload of migrants would be brought in from the sea, corpses among the living, while the music of the better-off Italians who still come to the island in the summer to party could be heard along the cliff edges and beaches. In Mytilene migrants who have often escaped from or walked through their own version of hell, take their first footsteps into their new life in a scene that shows the best of Greece’s good life.