Behind Walls: How Accommodation Facilities Disappear from Public View

Since 2015, Greece has developed, with remarkable speed, a complex and geographically dispersed infrastructure for the mass accommodation of migrants. In addition to facilities located near the country’s borders which are theoretically intended for the initial reception of those crossing them¹,  this infrastructure includes a network of temporary accommodation facilities across the mainland. These are typically sites whose key characteristics, such as the repetition of identical container-type housing units, an effort toward orthogonal spatial organization, and the presence of impenetrable fencing, evoke the spatial grammar of the refugee camp². 

From a legal perspective, the process began under the SYRIZA-ANEL coalition government with Law 4375/2016, which introduced the so-called open Facilities (anoichtes Domes). These were further classified as ‘contemporary reception facilities for asylum seekers’ and ‘contemporary accommodation facilities’ for individuals entering or residing in the country without the required legal formalities. The law thus provided legal recognition to a variety of accommodation sites that had already begun operating under the responsibility of state authorities³. 

The terminology itself revealed an underlying ambiguity: the facilities were described as ‘open’ but not as ‘Open’. This omission of the capital initial, while seemingly insignificant, rendered openness a secondary attribute rather than a defining characteristic of the facilities at the moment of their institutionalization. The facilities later acquired a General Operating Regulation, issued eighteen months after the New Democracy government came to power (Ministerial Decision 23/13532 of 30 November 2020)⁴.  Yet the regulation referred simply to ‘Facilities’ silently dropping the designation ‘open’. Shortly thereafter, the adventure of the terminology was completed, at least for the time being, with Law 4825/2021, under which these sites were officially renamed ‘Controlled Facilities’ (Controlled Temporary Accommodation Facilities for Asylum Seekers). What all these mean in practice?

At the level of everyday life, during the initial period when facilities were expanding across many parts of the country, residents could generally enter and leave without significant restrictions. Security had already been entrusted to units of the Hellenic Police as early as 2016, while the possibility of outsourcing this responsibility to private security companies was also foreseen. Yet the primary mechanism of isolation was simply the considerable distance that typically separated each facility from the nearest urban center. Access by outsiders likewise remained relatively open. As a result, what became known as the ‘summer of solidarity’ could continue, at least for a time, at the thresholds and open spaces of the camps. These interactions unfolded through a continuous process of negotiation between informal solidarity networks, self-organized initiatives, and individual citizens on the one hand, and the state-appointed management and security actors on the other⁵. 

Today, although residents of these facilities formally enjoy a ‘regime of free movement’ the practical content of that freedom is subject to numerous restrictions. According to the General Operating Regulation, entry and exit are controlled through technological surveillance systems as well as physical searches, and movement is limited to the hours specified by internal regulations. Furthermore, in the interest of the facility’s ‘orderly operation’, movement is restricted to designated areas, while security personnel are authorized to conduct foot patrols and carry out ad hoc inspections throughout the premises, including residents’ personal living quarters. Visits are now permitted only with prior written authorization. The gradual securitization of the facilities, initially more subtle and later more conspicuous, has produced spaces that often convey the impression of deliberate and heavily guarded isolation. Perhaps the most telling manifestation of this trend is the installation, since 2021, of perimeter walls made of concrete slabs around a number of facilities (Figure 1).

Figure 1. Segment of the perimeter enclosure of the Diavata Temporary Accommodation Facility, Thessaloniki.

Source: Google Maps © 2026.

At the level of publicly available information, the increasingly institutionalized involvement of the formal humanitarian sector, including numerous non-governmental organizations and major international agencies, in the management of the facilities generated a rapid expansion of available data, reports, visual material, and other official representations. Thus, from March 2016 to September 2018, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) published information bulletins through the UNHCR Operational Data Portal, including maps and statistical charts. From July 2019 until February 2022, a similar monthly report was produced by the Greek office of the International Organization for Migration (IOM) as part of its involvement in Site Management Support (SMS)⁶. These reports provided information on the managing body of each facility, the ethnic and age composition of the population, available services, housing arrangements, and infrastructure conditions, including sanitation facilities, access to public transportation, primary healthcare provision, meal services, and internet connectivity.

Although the methodology used to collect and analyze these data remained unclear, the existence of such reports appears to have served two purposes. First, they facilitated communication and coordination among actors within the humanitarian system. Second, they certified that a robust monitoring framework, based on specific criteria and guided by major international organizations, was in place. The choice of indicators is itself revealing with regard to what is considered important to know about accommodation infrastructure, and what is not. For example, the reports regularly noted the existence or absence of community feedback mechanisms, even if their actual operation was not explained. At the same time, however, they omitted data on the duration of residence, an omission that appears paradoxical for facilities defined from the outset as contemporary’.

Today, the amount of officially available information about these facilities has been drastically reduced. The regular publications of both UNHCR and IOM have ceased, and nothing has replaced them. On its website, the Greek Ministry of Migration and Asylum lists twenty-six Controlled Temporary Accommodation Facilities for Asylum Seekers⁷, yet discloses little more than their location and a small number of photographs. The only information made publicly available concerns the total number of residents, and even this emerges primarily through parliamentary scrutiny (see RSA 2024 & 2025). The abundance of published data has thus given way to silence.

If the first period ‘speaks’ of what one needs to know in order to assess the operation of a management mechanism characterized by technical competence and transparency, the message conveyed by the second period seems to be that the mechanism functions so effectively that no further knowledge is necessary.

Spatial exclusion is therefore complemented by informational exclusion. In an earlier period, when these facilities were less isolated, I argued that residence within them should be understood as a mechanism for the prolongation of displacement.⁸ Today, we may add that, located at a distance from residential areas, enclosed behind barriers that prevent any visual connection between inside and outside, and shielded by a veil of public silence, these facilities institutionalize, as official policy, the very process of ghettoization that many observers previously claimed to detect in the centre and neighbourhoods of Athens.

Footnotes

1. Initially known as ‘hotspots’ and later as Reception and Identification Centres (RICs), the facilities operating on the Aegean islands are now referred to as Closed Controlled Access Centres (CCACs). The term RIC continues to be used for the facility at Fylakio in Evros, as well as for the facilities at Malakasa (Attica) and Diavata (Thessaloniki), which are simultaneously classified as mainland accommodation facilities. ↩︎
2. As discussed below, the official language of the Greek authorities prefers the term ‘facilities’ (domes). In everyday humanitarian practice, however, the English term ‘camps’ is widely used without translation, both by humanitarian actors and by residents themselves. In academic literature, the Greek term katavlismos (‘camp’ or ‘settlement’) has also been employed (Kourachanis 2023). ↩︎
3. The earliest accommodation site was the Eleonas camp in Athens, established on land provided by the Municipality of Athens. It operated from August 2015 until December 2022, when it was evacuated through a series of police operations. See also Sossich (2025). ↩︎
4. During the first months of New Democracy’s administration, the legal framework was revised (Law 4636/2019) to introduce ‘Closed Temporary Reception Facilities’ for individuals who had applied for international protection and were simultaneously subject to detention orders. However, this amendment did not alter the regime governing the open facilities. ↩︎
5. On the tensions and complexities characterizing relations between self-organized solidarity initiatives and actors within the formal humanitarian system, see Rozakou (2017; 2018). ↩︎
6. By way of illustration, the September 2018 report recorded 24 facilities with a total population of 16,458 residents, while the February 2022 report also covered 24 facilities, with a resident population of 13,470. ↩︎
7. This figure includes the facilities at Malakasa and Diavata, which also function as mainland Reception and Identification Centres (RICs), as well as the Attiko Alsos facility in Athens, which operates as an ‘Open Accommodation Centre for Applicants for Voluntary Return’. It also includes the notorious facility at Sintiki (Serres, Northern Greece), which, however, operates largely under a distinctive regime of near-total restriction of freedom of movement. ↩︎
8. Within the extensive literature to which this argument belongs, it is worth noting René Kreichauf’s (2018) article from the same period, which discusses the ‘campization’ of refugee accommodation in Europe, a process that ‘territorializes migrants in extraterritorial locations’ (p. 18). ↩︎

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The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official position of the Interdisciplinary Migration Research Unit (IMRU) or the National Centre for Social Research (EKKE).

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