Jeanne Carstensen Lays Bare the Human Side of 'A Greek Tragedy'

In A Greek Tragedy: One Day, a Deadly Shipwreck, and the Human Cost of the Refugee Crisis, award-winning journalist, Jeanne Carstensen, takes us back to that fateful day in 2015 when hundreds of refugees traveling from Turkey to the Greek island of Lesvos were tossed into the water after their overcrowded, wooden boat collapsed while crossing the Aegean Sea. The passengers were promised safe passage by the smugglers of the boat, and what was supposed to be an effortless five mile ride to the island turned deadly when gale force winds caused the rickety, old boat to shipwreck. For Carstensen, who worked as a freelance foreign correspondent at the time, her interest in this particular incident sparked from her love of the island. She said, “I had already visited Lesvos as a tourist and had fallen in love with that island and that part of the world, and so then in 2015 when we started seeing the news that there was a mass movement of Syrians and other people from Turkey across to Lesvos, I was very interested in covering it as a journalist… so I had been on the island for about six weeks when October 28, 2015, when that terrible shipwreck happened, so I was there reporting on it and it was years later, like in about 2019, when I couldn’t get that shipwreck out of my mind. I felt I was so close, but yet I really didn’t know any of the human stories behind it, so then I decided to go back and write a book about it.”

As for the number of refugees who’ve drowned or have gone missing while fleeing their country, Carstensen said we’ll probably never know. “With these refugee shipwrecks, it’s much more chaotic, you don’t know who was on the boat in the first place. You don’t know their names, you don’t know how many people… so in this incident, there were about 350 people in the water, we’ll never know the exact number, and then after the shipwreck, bodies are washing up for days… since 2014 in the Mediterranean, over 31,000 people have drowned or dead or gone missing, and this is considered a drastic undercount, so imagine the families of these people… many times people don’t know what boat were they on, where they might’ve disappeared, and it’s so important for humans to be able to pay their last respects to their loved ones…”