A little after 8 am last Friday, Fadi, a Palestinian, freshly arrived from Amsterdam, joined the throng of aid workers, activists and journalists gathered around a warehouse in Kalamata’s port.
The 29-year-old was on a mission. “I thought I had spotted my little brother Mohammed among pictures of the [shipwreck’s] survivors,” said the Syrian-born chef, who has lived in the Dutch city for the past decade. “I knew he had gone to Libya to board the boat, so, praying to Allah he was still alive, I decided to get on a flight.”
Within hours of arriving in this port town, Fadi’s wish would come true in an electrifying moment caught on camera. “He had a photograph of his brother and wanted to talk,” said Themis Kanellopoulos, a Greek MEGA TV reporter who was interviewing him at the time. “As the camera was rolling, as he was relating the terrible circumstances that had brought him here, he saw Mohammed through the metal fence near the warehouse where the survivors were being kept. The euphoria of witnessing the two of them come together, right at that moment, was just incredible.”
The reunion of the two brothers was among many heartbreaking scenes that have played out in Kalamata since a fishing trawler, bound for Italy with perhaps as many as 800 people on board, capsized off the southern Peloponnese, a disaster of such magnitude that its effects are being felt well beyond the confines of Greece.
We're making a music video-but I can't play, or even act
I am in a lifeboat station on the south coast, standing beneath the stern of a rescue vessel, wearing a borrowed fisherman's jumper and holding a banjo. There are lights on me, and I am very much at sea.
BOOKS OF THE MONTH
The best translated fiction
Village people A chilly tone of doom infects these unsettling folk tales, following a settlement from the deep past to near future
The quintessential \"bad place\" is one of the staples of horror fiction. For Stephen King, the bad place - think the Overlook Hotel in The Shining - usually acts as a repository for a long-forgotten evil or injustice to resurface.
A labour of love Haruki Murakami revisits a hypnotic city of dreams and a tale of teen sweethearts, in material he's worked on over four decades
The elegiac quality of Haruki Murakami's new novel, his first in six years, was perhaps inevitable considering its origins. The City and Its Uncertain Walls began as an attempt to rework a 1980 story of the same title, originally published in the Japanese magazine Bungakukai, which Murakami, unsatisfied, never allowed to be republished or translated.
Leading questions The former German chancellor slights her enemies by barely mentioning them-and is frustratingly opaque on her own big calls
Towards the end of her 16-year tenure, former German chancellor Angela Merkel was garlanded with superlative titles: the \"queen of Europe\", the \"most powerful woman in the world\".
Double vision
Is the pay really that good? Do you get bored? We ask 'David Brent', 'Nessa' and 'Ali G' what it's like to make money as the lookalike of a comic creation
Robopop Teen star who does not exist
Miku is a 'Vocaloid' -a holographic avatar that represents a digital bank of vocal samples-performing sellout tours for thousands of very real mega-fans
The show must go wrong
How did a farce about a gaffe-filled amateur dramatic whodunnit become one of Britain's greatest ever exports, the toast of dozens of countries?
Europe's latest radical populist typifies a swing on the continent
Politics in Romania can be a bloody business, especially on the right. The excesses of the Iron Guard, an insurrectionary, violently antisemitic, ultranationalist 1930s political-religious militia, stood out even at a time when fascist parties were wreaking havoc in Germany, Italy and Spain. Given what is happening in Europe today, the events of that period are instructive.
It's high time to tax cannabis and fix French finances
France might not be broke, but the state of its public finances is, well, definitely not good. Total debt stands at €3.2tn ($3.4tn) - 112% of GDP. Interest payments on that debt are the second largest public expenditure after education (which includes everything from crêche, or preschool, to universities) and are higher than the amount spent on defence. And this year's budget deficit is projected to be 6%, three points above the EU's 3% limit.
