The river is called the Evros in Greek, Meriç in Turkish, and Maritsa in Bulgarian. In this article the name used changes to reflect the cultural and geopolitical division of the region and the river. When the entire river catchment is discussed all three names will be provided. When just the river border between Greece and Turkey is referred to, this changes to Evros/Meriç. When one name is provided, the river is addressed from the context of the relevant side of the border.
According to informal conversations we had with locals, in the days following the 10th of March, the water levels rose but the river never eventually flooded. Satellite photos support these claims, registering a small increase in water levels, which could nevertheless be attributed to rainfall. See Rémi Banet and Diana Simeonova “Articles Falsely Claim Bulgaria Flooded a Dam to Stop Migrants Crossing,” AFP Fact Check, March 16, 2020, ➝.
John W. Donaldson, “Paradox of the moving boundary: Legal heredity of river accretion and avulsion’ Water Alternatives 4, no. (2011): 155–170, 159.
Donaldson, 159, quoting Hugo Grotius, Of the Rights of War and Peace (London: Brown, Ward, Meares, 1715).
A concept most frequently referred to as “prevention through deterrence” in the case of the US border guard policy at the border with Mexico.
See FRONTEX Serious Incident Reports no. 211 and no. 407. “Technical obstacle” is used as a catch all term for impediments applied against foreign military movement as well as irregular border crossers or smugglers. It is used in a similar fashion to the description of minefields and cluster-bombs as “situational obstacles.” “Technical obstacles” do not stop crossings but merely contain and redirect them elsewhere.
Το ΒΗΜΑ Team, “Επεκτείνεται ο φράχτης του Έβρου στα ελληνοτουρκικά σύνορα (The Evros Fence along the Greek-Turkish Border is extended),” Το ΒΗΜΑ, March 5, 2020, ➝.
pronewsTV, “Έβρος: Αγρότης ψεκάζει μετανάστες και οι αστυνομικοί παρακολουθούν (Evros: Farmer Sprays migrants while policemen watch),” YouTube, March 8, 2020, ➝.
“Tear gas hits the fan during clashes on the Greece-Turkey border,” AP News, March 12, 2020, ➝.
“Μπλε μπογιά στους αλλοδαπούς για να εντοπίζονται εάν περάσουν τον φράκτη (Blue paint used against migrants to detect if they cross the fence),” Reportal, March 2, 2020, ➝.
“Turkish authorities have set fire to the tents housing illegal immigrants on their side of the Evros border,” Greek City Times, March 27, 2020, ➝. According to the Turkish Minister of Interior, the asylum seekers were loaded onto buses and transferred to nine different quarantine camps in Anatolia. “Minister of Interior Soylu: Sports, Fishing and Picnics are Prohibited,” TR24, March 27, 2020, ➝.
Jason de León, The Land of Open Graves: Living and Dying on the Migrant Trail (Oakland: University of California Press, 2015).
Juanita Sundberg, “Diabolic Caminos in the Desert and Cat Fights on the Río: A Posthumanist Political Ecology of Boundary enforcement in the United States-Mexico Borderlands,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 101, no. 2 (2011): 318–336.
Roxanne Lynn Doty, “Bare life: border-crossing deaths and spaces of moral alibi,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 29 (2011): 599–612.
What we call, after Achille Mbembe, the production of necro-hydrologies: where rivers become central figures in regimes of terror and the politics of death. Achille Mbembe, Necropolitics (Durham: Duke University Press, 2019).
The Trans Anatolian and Trans Adriatic pipelines meet under the Evros river.
T. D. Kanellopoulos et al., “Geochemical composition of the uppermost prodelta sediments of the Evros River, northeastern Aegean Sea,” Journal of Marine Systems 63 (2006): 63–78, 65.
Dr Yüksel Hoš, Twitter, (28th of February 2020), ➝.
Donaldson, “Paradox of the moving boundary,” 167.
The 1926 Athens Protocol, an annex to the 1923 Lausanne Peace Treaty, imagined the possibility of fixing the waters in place.
I. Dimitrakopoulos, Ta Chersaia Synora tis Helladas (The Land Borders of Greece), PhD Dissertation, (Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, 1986).
“Έπεσε ο φράχτης του Έβρου: Ο Σαμαράς τον έχτιζε, η φύση τον παρέσυρε (The fence of Evros fell: Samaras built it, nature carried it away),” News24/7, February 3, 2015, ➝.
“Ντοκουμέντο: Έσκαψαν τρύπα κάτω από τον φράχτη στον Έβρο (They dug a hole under the fence in Evros),” News Bomb, October 23, 2017, ➝.
ProAsyl, The Greek Council for Refugees, and Infomobile, “Walls of Shame: Accounts from the inside: The Detention Centre of Evros” (April 2012), ➝, 8.
Stefan Helmreich, “How to Hide an Island.” In Daniel Daou and Pablo Pérez-Ramos eds., New Geographies 8: Island (Cambridge: Harvard Graduate School of Design, 2017), 82–87, 84.
Michel Serres, The Natural Contract, trans. by Elizabeth MacArthur and William Paulson (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press 1995), 51–53.
Konstantinos Chouvardas and Christos Papapostolou, “River Floods and Crossborder Cooperation: The case of Evros River,” Geographies 27 (2016): 44–71.
Angeliki Mentzafou, Vasiliki Markogianni, and Elias Dimitriou, “The Use of Geospatial Technologies in Flood Hazard Mapping and Assessment: Case Study from River Evros’ Pure and Applied Geophysics 174 (2017): 679–700, 680. Bulgarian dams are “mainly for hydropower production and secondarily for irrigation purposes and fish-breeding.”
Ibid.
Despite dams on upstream Bulgarian tributaries, because of its significance as a border and with little transboundary water management the main course of the river in the Greece/Turkey section has no dams or artificial barriers, rare for such a large river, this may make it an important habitat for fish. See Stamatis Zogaris et al., “Assessment of Riparian Zone and River Island Conditions in a Trans-Boundary Greenbelt: The Evros/Meriç River (Greece-Turkey),” Fresenius Environmental Bulletin 24, no. 1 (2015): 269–277, 275.
Heather Cooley and Peter H. Gleick, “Climate-Proofing Transboundary Water Agreements’ Hydrological Sciences 56, no. 4 (2011): 711–718, 715.
Stylianos Skias and Andreas Kallioras, “Cross border co-operation and the problem of flooding in the Evros Delta.” In Joris Verwijmeren and Mark Wiering eds., Many Rivers to Cross: Cross Border Co-operation in River Management (Delft: Eburon, 2007), 128.
Ibid, 133.
“Joint Declaration Between the Government of the Hellenic Republic and the Government of the Republic of Turkey,” Izmir March 2016, signed by prime ministers Alexis Tsipras and Ahmet Davutoglu, ➝.
Sandro Mezzadra analyzes this metaphor within public discourse as the use of terminology from communication theory and sociology to render migration “objective’ and separate from the “actions of subjects.” Sandro Mezzadra, “The Right to Escape,” Ephemera 4, no. 3 (2004): 267–275.
Lissa Malkki explores a similar process in the case of Tanzania where the metaphor of floods of refugees is mobilised against the perceived threat of refugees. Lissa H, Malkki, Purity and Exile: Violence, Memory, and National Cosmology among Hutu Refugees in Tanzania (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 15. Likewise, Emma Haddad draws on the liquid metaphor as uprooting and displacing. Emma Haddad, “Danger Happens at the Border.” In Prem Kumar Rajaram and Carl Grundy-Warr eds., Borderscapes: Hidden Politics and Geographies at Territories Edge (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 119–136, 122.
Helena Drysdale, “Night vigil in Thrace: Despite its turmoil, ever more people are risking their lives to enter Greece. Welcome to Europe’s most porous border,” AEON, September 17, 2012, ➝.
FRONTEX has long considered the Greek-Turkish borders as a laboratory for testing operational diagrams that it goes on to apply elsewhere in Europe. The first Poseidon Operations, Poseidon Sea and Poseidon Land, were launched in 2008, with a focus on safeguarding Greece’s –and by extension, Europe’s external- sea and land borders respectively. Since then, the Poseidon Operations have been periodically renewed and upscaled to what was until recently called Operation Poseidon Rapid Intervention. During the drafting of this piece, Frontex operations were upscaled further to Rapid Border Intervention Evros 2020 and Rapid Border Intervention Aegean 2020. One hundred Frontex officers were deployed to the Evros region on 12/03/2020. FRONTEX, “Frontex launches rapid border intervention on Greek land border,” March 13, 2020, ➝.
Jennifer Rankin, “EU Praises Greece as “Shield’ After Turkey Opens Border,” The Guardian, March 3, 2020, ➝.
M. Rombou-Levidi, “’Dancing Beyond the “Barre’: Cultural Practices and the Processes of Identification in Eastern Macedonia, Greece,” unpublished PhD dissertation, (University of Sussex, 2009), 8–9.
Including two cases brought by Forensic Architecture in the last four months: Forensic Architecture, “Pushbacks Across The Evros/Meriç River: The Case Of Ayşe Erdoğan” February 8, 2020, ➝; Forensic Architecture, “Pushbacks Across The Evros/Meriç River: Analysis Of Video Evidence,” December 13, 2019, ➝.
“14 Travellers attempt to cross Turkish-Greek land border, one dead person,” Watch the Med, May 8, 2018, ➝.
Demetris Angelidis, “They took my papers, took me to the river, and passed me across…,” EFSYN, February 12, 2018), ➝.
As Pavlos Pavlidis, coroner at the university hospital of Alexandroupolis, told us in an informal interview, seasonal floods often also perform the opposite role. The rising waters untangle bodies that had been caught in twigs or swallowed by the mud for months and render death in the Evros/Meric visible.
Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011).
Stefanos Levidis & Ifor Duncan, “Sounding the Arcifinious,” Movement Radio, February 23, 2020, ➝.
Pavlidis has said: “Those who die from hypothermia can maintain the last body posture and facial expression they had when they fell asleep.” “Crossing Through the Land Border: What are the Risks,” Stop Evros Wall, March 2, 2019, ➝.
Nello Scavo, “Tra Turchia e Grecia. Cani, doppiette, trattori e neonazi: la caccia ai profughi,” Avvenire, March 12, 2020, ➝.
See the work of Anuradha Mathur and Dilip Da Cunha on the expanded de-colonial conceptions of rivers and in particular deltaic and estuarine space. Anuradha Mathur and Dilip Da Cunha, Soak: Mumbai in an Estuary (New Delhi: Rupa Publications, 2009). Dilip Da Cunha, The Invention of Rivers; Alexander’s Eye and Ganga’s Descent (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018).
Anssi Paasi, “Border studies reanimated: going beyond the territorial/relational Divide,” Environment and Planning A 44, no. 10 (2012): 2303–2309, 2304.