Today w/Forensic Architecture, we publish our interactive cartographic platform, tracing 100 years of border design along the Evros/Meriç river between Greece and Turkey, at the EU’s southeastern frontier:

The platform maps over 60 cases of asylum seekers stranded on islets and sandbanks along the river border, revealing a pattern of abandonment as an intentional and lethal strategy of border deterrence.

In 1926, the border was first drawn along the median line between the river banks. A century later, this line no longer follows the river. In recent years, GR and TR have weaponised this ambiguity in order to deter and hurt asylum seekers, and to hide the traces of this violence.

Our platform plots, for the first time, the precise course of the Evros/Meriç border line, which is incorrectly displayed on all mainstream navigation apps and had previously been inaccessible to civil society actors and EU bodies alike.

The platform also allows users to import coordinates and examine them against the accurate border line, providing a tool for organisations who receive distress signals from stranded groups, or teams who litigate on past cases.

Also mapped and modelled is the expanding architecture of fences, surveillance antennas and border guard stations in the region. Despite it often being referred to as a ‘natural border’, today the Evros/Meriç is a hyper-designed border infrastructure.

In the summer of 2023 Evros was ravaged by the largest and longest-lasting wildfires ever recorded in Europe. The platform maps the daily expansion of the fire against the locations of groups of asylum seekers who were endangered, harmed, or lost their lives as a result.

The platform shows that directing and stranding border crossers to the hostile environments of Evros/Meriç, whether by fire or water, can have deadly effects. A full century after its demarcation, this river border is deadlier and more opaque than ever.

The research would not have been possible without the efforts and contribution of @alarm_phone, @Border_Violence and @GCRefugees.

@Border_Violence @GCRefugees Read more about the investigation on our website:

Read the article by @EFSYNTAKTON (Greek):

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