Greek islanders tipped for Nobel prize stoic about nomination

Record ID: 84576

  • Title: Greek islanders tipped for Nobel prize stoic about nomination
  • Date: 6th October 2016
  • Summary: LESBOS, GREECE (FILE - OCTOBER 2015) (REUTERS) VOLUNTEERS HELPING MIGRANTS GET OFF A BOAT ON TO THE BEACH VOLUNTEERS PASSING A YOUNG CHILD WHO IS CRYING OFF THE BOAT VOLUNTEERS HELPING MIGRANTS, INCLUDING WOMEN AND CHILDREN, GET OFF THE BOAT VOLUNTEERS TRYING TO REVIVE AN UNCONSCIOUS WOMAN LYING ON THE BEACH LITTLE GIRL IN PINK HAT AND PINK COAT SITTING ON BEACH LOOKING AT CAMERA VOLUNTEERS AND AID WORKERS OFFERING HELP TO NEWLY ARRIVED MIGRANTS / DISCARDED LIFE JACKETS ON THE BEACH
  • Embargoed: 21st October 2016 11:15
  • Keywords: migrants refugees Nobel Greece Lesbos Aegean islands
  • Location: LESBOS, GREECE
  • City: LESBOS, GREECE
  • Country: Greece
  • Topics: Asylum/Immigration/Refugees,Government/Politics
  • Reuters ID: LVA00252VABLZ
  • Aspect Ratio: 16:9
  • Story Text: Islanders from Greece's Lesbos have been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize which will be announced on Friday (October 7).
    The nomination of a small number of the islanders is a symbolic gesture to all the Greek people who helped pull thousands of migrants to safety after they made the dangerous journey across the Mediterranean.
    Greek fisherman Stratis Valamios is one of those who have been chosen symbolically to represent all Greeks and volunteers who helped refugees. For months, he would steer his boat out to sea, only instead of fish, he pulled out people.
    "It was like a war zone," Valamios, now a co-nominee for the Nobel Peace Prize, said of his tiny seaside village of Skala Sikamnias on Lesbos, the island where more than 800,000 people escaping war and conflict in the Middle East and beyond arrived in 2015.
    "You had the wounded, the dead," he said matter-of-factly. "We brought in many babies out here on the concrete, on the tables, and they died in our arms."
    No one knows how many people Valamios and other locals saved from drowning, but it is believed to be in the hundreds.
    Some days, Valamios would fit 20 people in his 3-metre (less than 10 foot) long motorboat. Its railing is still broken and wobbly from when one Syrian man tried to desperately cling onto it, he said.
    Those days are gone, and since March, when the European Union and Turkey agreed a deal to close off that route, only a handful of refugees arrive each week. Life in the picturesque harbor has resumed its sleepy pace.
    Valamios said he was proud of his fellow villagers for having helped so many people. But he said winning the Nobel Prize would change nothing for the refugees.
    "To award someone for something he did might set an example to other people to do the same, it might. Imagine that they give me the Nobel, or to anyone else for that matter. But what was happening still goes on. On Friday, when they give the Nobel, bombs will still fall there (Syria) and people will still get killed. So I think it makes no difference, neither for myself and nor for anyone else," he said.
    Down the road, fellow Nobel nominee Emilia Kamvisi, an 86-year-old grandmother and the daughter of Greek refugees who fled Turkey in 1922, said she never expected tragedy to hit home but felt compelled to help, having heard stories of her own family.
    Kamvisi gained worldwide attention when she was captured in a photograph bottle-feeding a Syrian refugee baby in her arms last year.
    "In this old age I will die with a clear conscience," she said.
    As he repaired his fishing nets, 63-year-old fisherman Thanasis Marmarinos said the island deserved the Nobel, but on a personal level, he said it wasn't important.
    If they win, the $930,000 prize will go towards struggling Greek island hospitals, the nominating committee has said.
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