Poros Detention Centre
The detention centre at Poros was initially built as a military facility but was transferred to the Hellenic Police in 2012 and was repurposed with EU External Borders Fund, officially operating as a border guard station to detain migrants when other sites are over capacity.
We sourced the respective contracts from 2011 (in Greek). They can be accessed in full here.
We found that in practice, the Poros facility operates as one of the main nodes of the illegal pushback infrastructure, a ‘deport centre’, where migrants are subjected to degrading and violent treatment, before being pushed back across the Evros/Meriç river. (video © Lena Karamanidou)
Read a relevant article by the Respond Project here.
Tychero Border Guard Station
People have been held in the Tychero border guard station since at least the early 2010s. A 2012 report from the NGOs ProAsyl and the Greek Council for Refugees titled “Walls of Shame, Accounts from the Inside: the Detention Centres of Evros” documented the deplorable conditions inside the centre. The same report documents the presence of FRONTEX in Tychero from as early as 2012.
The vehicles that Kuzey described, a military green truck (an Iveco Eurocargo 4×4), and a white van (a Toyota Hiace) are also documented parked outside Tychero in the report.
The same vehicles were photographed outside Tychero, and next to a pile of boats, in November 2018 and in February 2019.
Since 2014, Tychero has been a central node in the ‘automated system for border surveillance’ in Evros, which was co-funded by the EU.
Kuzey described being detained in a room with bunk beds. Even though we could not access recent photographs from inside the centre, we sourced documents that confirm that such beds were installed in 2013 in Fylakio, another border guard station in the region.
Missing from Kuzey’s model is the back of the building, facing the railway. Kuzey never visited this part of the building, but numerous other testimonies mention the characteristic, cage-like structure. (bottom video © Lena Karamanidou)
Weather
During the description of his pushback, Kuzey mentioned that “it was raining heavily.” Meteorological data from that day confirm this. The forecast can be accessed here.
