The Skaramagkas refugee camp

The Skaramagkas refugee camp started operating in 2017 and closed down in 2021. At any point during this period, it housed between 2,500 and 4,000 mainly Arab-speaking refugees from Syria, Kurdistan and Iraq.

This aerial photograph taken from Google maps might present an image of the Skaramagka camp as a neutral space, with lines of containers arranged in a rigid grid pattern, tidy and sterile. But if someone were to walk through the actual camp, they would probably get the sense of a poor, messy, boisterous city struggling to survive.

Through the efforts of their residents, the neutral, no-frills containers were transformed into homes. The refugees created front yards, changed the furniture, and decorated according to their needs and tastes. Transforming a container into a home, usually a female task, appears to be a particularly important process through which the camp residents do not simply organise their household, but try to restore some form of stability, regain a sense of belonging, and re-establish ‘normality’ for them and their families.

Simultaneously, tens of small shops opened at the camp, built out of materials the refugees could get on site, such as metal bedframes, pieces of plastic or fabric, carboard boxes, or supplies they bought for cheap at the Schisto Sunday bazaar. Mini markets, barber shops, tailor shops, billiards places, shops that served falafels and hookah pipes all operated inside the camp; informal, makeshift shops which helped the residents cover their basic needs, while also complementing the income of those who set them up.

Although the relevant literature often presents refugee camps as spaces of total sovereign power and ‘bare life’, while casting the refugees as passive victims and vulnerable subjects, an ethnographic perspective reveals not only the hardships, but also the various survival strategies that the refugees employ in order to rebuild their lives and the places they inhabit.