Makronisos Story

 Today, folks got hyped over the solution that the Greeks are looking at, for the burned refugee camp over at Lesbos.

The isle in question?  Makronisos.

Never heard of it?  Well....if you pull up a Greece map...it's the island off the mainland....maybe five kilometers into the Med, which is about 20 square kilometers.  

Reputation?  In the 1940s....it became a political prison isle, and stayed that way through the 1970s, until the prison was shut down.

A historical site?  Well...that's the funny thing about the isle.  It's regarded as 'holy' grounds for the conditions that it maintained in the thirty-odd years of operations.  You aren't supposed to improve the site.....you can't dismantle the site.  

Over the past decade, some digs have been accomplished on the island, but it's rare that anyone says much over what they found.  

Making this into a holding site for the 13,000 refugees?  Some people are already fairly torn up by this idea, but some Greeks are saying they are fed up with damage done to tourism on Lesbo, and because of the zero tourism stance of Makronisos.....it'd be a perfect site for the 13k.  

Getting up to speed?  You'd need some kind of dock set up, and temp-housing (naturally paid for by the EU).  

Journalists hyped up and negative over this?  Absolutely....telling the various 1940s stories over and over.  But if you sit and measure the distance between the isle and the mainland....it's marginally 3 km's in distance.  With an innertube, you could swim this in two to three hours.  So putting them there on the isle means they can escape to the mainland overnight, and stage a walk to Germany from there.  

In some ways, I think the Greeks are grinning and doing the isle trick....to let the group escape and reach Germany in the end.