A street vendor from Bangladesh on Olympou Street

This interview with R. from Bangladesh was conducted in 2014. At the time, the interviewee was 30 years old and had been living in Greece since 2007. As R. mentions in the interview, he first arrived in Athens where he lived for five years doing manual labour in farms on the outskirts of the city. In 2012, he settled in Thessaloniki. The main reason why he decided to move was the fact that he had been attacked by Golden Dawn members in Athens. As the victim of a racist attack, R. received humanitarian asylum and, as he says, he decided to go to Thessaloniki to live his life in ‘peace’.

At the time of the interview, R. was sharing a place on Olympou Street on the outskirts of Ano Poli. With his tricycle, he picked items off the streets and kept them in a ground-level storehouse on Olympou Street. In the interview, he says that he picked scrap metal off the streets and resold it, painted houses, and worked with Chinese traders.

Even before the refugee crisis of 2015, there had been mass population movements from Asian countries towards Europe. For many of these migrants, Greece became a transit stop en route to the ‘West’. However, as most of them lacked legitimate travel documents, they were faced with a hostile environment created by high unemployment rates – a legacy of the 2010 economic crisis – insurmountable difficulties in acquiring residence and work permits or any sort of formal recognition outside of political asylum, and a rise in far-right activity. The harsh conditions for migrants and asylum seekers in Greece at the beginning of the 2010s established the country as a transitional space on the way to a better future. This is also reflected in R.’s interview, even though he ended up staying in Greece for years.