Migration Media Award: Third Place, Print Category English
Author: Alexander Clapp
Media: Economist 1843 Magazine
Date of Publication: 24 October, 2018
Title: Europe’s Heart of Darkness
Short summary: This is a report from a town twenty kilometers west of Athens called Aspropyrgos. Most of its population does not speak Greek. Virtually every object that reaches Greece by sea goes to Aspropyrgos for storage – only to then leave it on trucks for the rest of Greece or the Balkans without leaving so much as a trace. It is also the place that the Chinese Overseas Shipping Company has chosen to be its primary railway hub in Europe to redistribute goods along One Belt, One Road. Aspropyrgos is a concentration of the problems that are afflicting Europe at a much larger level. Crime is rampant. The state is absent. The economic crisis had pitted its minorities against one another in increasingly tribal ways. Some see a solution to their problems in the arrival of the Chinese. Others look to the neo-Nazi Golden Dawn party, which has helped restore many social services that Athens could no longer afford to provide.
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Europe’s heart of darkness
One night last April Konstantinos Potouridis disappeared from his home in Aspropyrgos, an industrial town in central Greece. Two weeks later, his uncle Kostas received a phone call from his abductors. “They said my nephew was still alive,” Kostas explains, “but they wanted €1,500 for his return.” Kostas didn’t contact the authorities.
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