A Map of Future Ruins

Lauren Markham is a journalist whose Greek American family traces its roots to the island of Andros in the Cyclades. In this work of narrative nonfiction, she interweaves an investigation into the 2020 burning of Moria refugee camp on the Greek island of Lesbos with memoir, travel writing, and cultural criticism to examine how myths of Western identity, whiteness, and belonging shape immigration policy and the treatment of refugees in both Greece and the United States.

The book opens with the September 2020 fire at Moria, a refugee camp on Lesbos built for 3,500 people but housing roughly 11,000 during the COVID-19 pandemic. On the night of September 8, fires consumed most of the camp within hours. Refugees evacuated, but police blockaded the road to Mytilene, the island's main town, while far-right groups blocked the opposite direction, stranding thousands for days. Within two days, six young Afghan men were arrested and charged with arson, becoming known as the Moria 6.

Markham introduces herself as someone drawn to Greece by professional and personal compulsions. On her first trip to Athens in 2019 with her husband, Ben, she visits the Acropolis and wanders into the hillside neighborhood of Anafiotika, where Demetrios, an elderly local Athenian, plays a bouzouki, a Greek stringed instrument, and warns that refugees are overrunning Greece. Markham recognizes his anxiety as part of a larger pattern of nativist fear and begins articulating the book's central questions: how myths surrounding ancient Greece as the birthplace of Western civilization intersect with contemporary border enforcement, and how stories of past migration are valorized while present-day migrants are criminalized.

To ground these questions, Markham introduces Ali Sayed, a young Afghan whose journey illustrates the mechanics of forced migration. Ali left Afghanistan at 13, crossing into Iran and then Türkiye before saving 1,000 euros for a seat on a smuggler's boat across the Aegean. When he arrived on Lesbos, Greek officials registered him as 18 rather than 16, denying him protections available to unaccompanied minors. At Moria, Ali was assigned a tent in the olive groves and entered an indefinite wait for his asylum interview, enduring violence, ethnic tensions, and conditions that included one shower for every 506 residents. A center-right government elected in 2019 slowed transfers off the islands, and when COVID-19 restrictions sealed the camp, Ali was effectively imprisoned.

Alongside the investigation, Markham traces how the myth of ancient Greece as the origin of Western civilization has been constructed and co-opted. She draws on scholar Kwame Anthony Appiah's argument that "the West" as a concept emerged only in the 1890s and recounts how Renaissance artists embraced the bare white marble of classical sculptures as authentic, unaware that the original bold pigments had worn away over centuries. This misunderstanding laid groundwork for racial pseudoscience: In the 18th century, Dutch anatomist Pieter Camper ranked racial groups by how closely their facial angles resembled the Apollo Belvedere, a marble sculpture that had become a standard of ideal beauty. Adolf Hitler purchased a replica of the Discobolus, a classical sculpture of a discus thrower, as a representation of the ideal white human form. Markham notes that nothing in the historical record suggests ancient Greece had a collective identity of whiteness, yet classical iconography remains a touchstone of white supremacy. She connects this to scholar Svetlana Boym's concept of "restorative nostalgia," an anti-modern, nationalist project of reincarnating a nonexistent past.

Markham also explores how maps function as instruments of storytelling and dominion. The first map of modern Greece, drawn in 1797 by Rigas Velestinlis, a Greek exile seeking independence from the Ottomans, was less a representation of geography than an idea, filled with images of Greek gods and allusions to ancient myths. She connects this to Afghanistan, whose borders were largely drawn by the British during the 19th-century Great Game, splitting Pashtun communities and causing lasting instability.

Woven through these investigations is Markham's family history. Her great-grandmother Evanthia left Andros in 1914 at 16, sailed to New York in third class, and settled in the Boston area. Markham documents the anti-Greek racism of the era, including a 1909 mob in Omaha, Nebraska, that destroyed Greek businesses and expelled the community. Over time, Greek Americans were absorbed into whiteness. Evanthia scolded her daughters for getting too tan and, in later years, expressed prejudice against Black people. "This country had taught Evanthia its hierarchy," Markham writes, "and she had assimilated and internalized that mythology in full" (76). The family narrative emphasizes success while glossing over casualties: the suicide of Evanthia's son Theodore and his sister Tula's early death from alcoholism.

Markham's 2019 visit to Lesbos with Thi Bui, a writer, artist, and former colleague, provides an immersive view of Moria. In the northern town of Klio, she meets elders whose families fled Asia Minor, the western peninsula of present-day Türkiye, during the 1922 Catastrophe. These elders draw direct parallels between their grandparents' displacement and the refugees now arriving on Lesbos.

The investigation reached its climax at the June 2021 trial on the island of Chios, where four of the six defendants faced charges. The court cleared all independent observers, citing COVID concerns. The prosecution's case rested on a cell phone video shot from behind, making identification impossible, and the written testimony of an Afghan eyewitness who had disappeared after being granted asylum. His testimony was contradicted by the fire report: The zone he identified did not burn until the following day, ignited by wind-carried embers rather than arson. All four defendants were found guilty and sentenced to 10 years. As they were loaded into police vehicles, supporters shouted "azadi, azadi," the Dari word for "freedom."

Returning to Greece after the verdict, Markham reports on pushbacks, the illegal practice of forcing refugees back across borders before they can seek asylum. She documents cases of refugees abandoned on uninhabited islands and forcibly returned to Türkiye, as well as the Greek government's escalating criminalization of humanitarian workers and journalists. Between 2021 and 2022, Greece dropped from 70th to 108th on the Reporters Without Borders press freedom index.

In the book's later sections, Markham profiles individuals who resist the border regime. Crane operator Michalis Protopsaltis on the island of Kythera heard voices from the sea during a storm, drove his construction crane to the shore, and lifted 80 refugees from the water two at a time. On Samos, lawyer Dimitris Choulis met new arrivals using existing Greek law, despite threats from islanders and government scrutiny.

The appeal of the Moria 6 was repeatedly delayed, eventually reset for March 2024. A report commissioned by the defense from Forensic Architecture, a multimedia human rights firm, used metadata from hundreds of photos and videos to demonstrate the eyewitness testimony was false, but the report was never presented because of the postponement. Meanwhile, a ship carrying roughly 700 people capsized in Greek waters off Pylos; some 600 drowned. The prime minister's party won reelection, and a new far-right party endorsed by the imprisoned leader of Golden Dawn, Greece's neo-Nazi party, won 3 percent of the national vote.

In the book's final scene, Markham stands with Sedique, a young Afghan woman she has befriended, in a gallery in Mytilene. Sedique has painted a woman in a fire-red ball gown leaping over a glimmering sea toward green land. She is tired of looking backward. "I just wanted to paint something beautiful," she says. Markham recognizes the painting as a reclaimed narrative, "a wishful oracle for the future."