Cooperstown Resident Publishes History of Greek Migrant Crisis

By WRILEY NELSON
COOPERSTOWN

In the last months of 2014, a backwater fishing village on the Greek island of Lesvos became the epicenter of the global refugee crisis. Molyvos, an increasingly popular tourist destination that sits just across the four mile-wide Straits of Mytilene from Turkey, suddenly became the entryway to the European Union for thousands of refugees. According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, about 450,000 displaced people descended on the village of fewer than 1,000 permanent residents between November 2014 and March 2016. Greek, EU and international authorities failed to take any action for nearly 10 months, leaving a small group of local volunteers as the only source of help for tens of thousands of desperate, sick, injured and malnourished people. The crisis did not even receive much media attention, and no full account of the volunteer efforts has yet been published. That will change at the beginning of October, when John Webb, a close friend of the volunteer leaders and a Cooperstown resident, publishes “Molyvos: A Greek Village’s Heroic Response to the Global Refugee Crisis.” The book is based on years of research and extensive interviews with many of the local volunteers.