Every third shop on Fevzi Pasha Boulevard, a wide shopping street that led to the smugglers’ quarter, was happy to oblige.
“Original Yamaha,” shopkeepers would shout to passing refugees. “Come in and try one.” Some shoe-sellers and tailors put their usual stock in the basements, and started selling crudely made lifejackets instead. Smugglers block-booked the rooms of nearby hotels for their clients. Greece lay just across the Aegean.
In 2015, if there was a ground zero for Europe’s migration crisis, it was here, on the western Turkish coast. But a few months on, a deal has been struck between the EU and Ankara which should see most migrants arriving in Greece being deported back to Turkey, and the picture is very different. The hotels are empty. And the shopkeepers on Fevzi Pasha Boulevard are largely back to their original stock.
Sitting in a cafe in front of the train station, a thick orange scarf wrapped around his neck, a Syrian tailor watches people timidly as his son makes castles out of sugar cubes. A few weeks ago this cafe and the square teemed with smugglers conducting their illicit trade in the open, and refugees negotiating prices. Today, two Turkish police officers stand on a street corner to scare away smugglers and their clients.
The tailor and his son have been in Turkey for months, while their friends and relatives have reached Germany. But he cannot afford what the smugglers charge for a trip across the sea. Finally, after fidgeting with his scarf, his nails and his phone, he summons up the courage to ask a man sitting at the next table if he is Syrian.
Yes, answers the man. And you? “Yes, I am also Syrian,” the tailor whispers back. “I am a Kurd from Qamishli [a north-eastern city on the border with Turkey]. I want to go to Europe but I don’t have any money, so I am looking for someone to take me along. I will go like a servant, a friend, anything. I was a tailor in Qamishli and I can be very useful.”
But, he asks the man, how can he get to Europe if he does not even have enough money to buy bread for his five children? “Maybe in Europe I can find a job,” he wonders. “Do you know anyone who can help?” The man gives him a few lira to buy bread, and promises to help him find not a smuggler but a job.
Some Syrians do manage to find work on the black market in Izmir. And some refuse to travel to Europe because they want to stay close to home. “I came to Turkey because I ran away from military service, but my soul is in Damascus, and if the war stops today, I will be home tomorrow,” says one fair-haired refugee.
But many, like Mamdouh, have no choice. The illegal work they can find in Turkey is so poorly paid that it does not come close to allowing them to save for a smuggler’s fare.
Young and earnest, Mamdouh lives with his father, mother, wife and three children in two rooms of a half-ruined house in the squalor of the old citadel area of Izmir. At night, along with many other Syrians, Mamdouh roams the streets scavenging for plastic bottles and cardboard boxes to sell. If he is lucky, he will make about 650 to 700 lira (roughly £160-£170) a month. Around 450 lira goes on rent and bills.
But, in the swelling underclass that is Turkey’s exploited and abused Syrian population, Mamdouh, with his black market job and a roof over his head, is one of the lucky ones.
Many of those less fortunate end up being enslaved by work masters who ferry refugees around southern Turkey as labourers and farmhands. These Syrians live in tents made of tarpaulin sheets stretched over branches and twigs.
In one settlement perched on the edge of a farm, just behind the animal sheds, an old woman stands in front of a plastic sheet and a few pots. These are her life possessions. “Why are we here?” she asks. “Because they are fighting on our land. Isis and the Kurds and the regime are all fighting on our farms. We left it for them and came here.”
Girls stand or sit outside; children paddle in the thick, foam-edged sludge that runs between the tents. The people living here are paid half the wages of Turkish workers; the work masters, who are usually Syrian themselves, take 10% of the wages as commission. Out of those wages the refugees have to pay rent for the land where they set up their tents, as well as extra for the use of water and electricity.
In a clearing in front of the tents, two sisters crouch in front of mud stoves cooking a communal lunch of fried potatoes and onion. They feed the fire with twigs and small chunks of plastic that produce bursts of thick white smoke. The elder sister, who is 19 and pregnant with her second child, squints but sits still in the acrid air. This baby, like her first, will be born into destitution.
For some, the waiting eventually pays off. Down a cobbled alleyway, behind the Basmane train station, two young Syrian couples walk briskly carrying cheap plastic backpacks and lifejackets. They are met by a middle-aged man in a tattered leather jacket and black jeans, who beckons to them. They walk in single file behind him. The man has said there is a boat leaving tonight.
But for many refugees who cross the sea and make their way north, the Greek-Macedonian border is the end of the line – at least for now.
Shaima, a young teacher from Deir es-Zor in eastern Syria, lives at one end of an impromptu camp in an abandoned train station in Idomeni. Her family fled their home when rebels fighting the Assad regime laid siege to it in 2012.
They were not supporters of the Syrian regime but the siege and mortar shelling turned the small, beautiful city on the banks of the Euphrates river into a battered maze of sniper alleyways.
First they settled in Hesseke, north-eastern Syria, but when Isis came they fled further north into Turkey. Last year Shaima’s husband and her two older children walked to Germany. Now she is trying to catch up – but the road is closed. She is stranded.
guardian
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