A Greek Tragedy

Bay Area Journalist Jeanne Carstensen discusses her new book about the Syrian refugee crisis at the Sebastopol Community Cultural Center on Sunday, April 6th

San Francisco-based journalist Jeanne Carstensen spent the better part of the last decade covering and researching the Syrian refugee crisis for her new book, A Greek Tragedy.

While covering the Syrian refugee crisis in Greece and Turkey a decade ago, San Francisco-based journalist Jeanne Carstensen found herself reporting on a tragedy that eclipsed the daily disasters of the time by an order of magnitude. It involved the sinking of a rickety, overloaded Turkish fishing boat laden with an estimated 300 refugees on Oct. 28, 2015, off the coast of the Greek island of Lesvos. The scale of the event, with at least 76 people drowned—including many children—and an unknown number missing, gained worldwide attention.

But as Carstensen covered the incident she realized in the days and weeks and months following it that the chaos of that day left many, if not most, of the details and facts obscured. Differing accounts of the number of people drowned, missing and recovered, as well as of who actually rescued the surviving refugees, emerged from different sources. In fact, no one seemed to know who any of the actual refugees were, their names or stories or what happened to the survivors.

In her attempts to answer these questions, Carstensen spent nearly a decade researching the events surrounding the incident, and in the process wrote her newly released book, A Greek Tragedy, which she will discuss Sunday, April 6, at 5:45 p.m. at the Sebastopol Community Cultural Center. Broadcaster and author Michael Krasny will join her in conversation.

For Carstensen, the story of the boat tragedy crystallized the larger Syrian and global refugee crises into something understandable for the average person.

“The Syria situation remains one of the largest displacement crises in the world, with a 2025 projection of 7.2 million internally displaced people (IDPs), and 6.2 million refugees…” according to the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) website. In addition, it says that more than 117.3 million people were forcibly displaced worldwide at the end of 2023, which equates to more than 1 in every 69 people on Earth. And the number of displaced people globally has increased year by year for the past 12 years.

“The numbers become abstract, and I can’t really take it in,” Carstensen said. “So I went a very different direction in this book, and I made it very novelistic. It’s very much about [going] deep into the lives and stories of the people that day.

“You’re seeing things through the eyes of four refugees,” she continued. “Where they came from and how they were feeling when they got on the boat, and how they felt in the water. And at the same time, you’re also going to meet local people on this island of Lesvos.”

Carstensen pursued many leads in her attempt to reconstruct the events surrounding the boat disaster. With no passenger list to work off of, due to the illegal nature of the smuggling operation, she eventually located reporters and European residents who provided her with the names of a few survivors who she then tracked down across Europe. Her quest resulted in six reporting expeditions to Greece, Germany, Belgium, Turkey, Norway and France.

In the end, she was able to reconstruct the lives and stories of four survivors, including the details of the voyage itself and the immediate aftermath of the shipwreck, as well as the stories of Greek islanders who directly assisted with and were deeply affected by the rescue effort.

The New York Times, The Nation, Foreign Policy, Salon and The World have all published or broadcast Carstensen’s work. Grants and fellowships she received from The Pulitzer Center, Logan Nonfiction Program and Mesa Refuge helped fund her years spent researching her new book. Her talk at Sebastopol Community Cultural Center is one stop on a book tour taking her from the Bay Area to Portland, New York City and Los Angeles.

SCCC board member Kenyon Webster said, “The diversity of our classes and events is what excites me. Our next Author Talk featur[ing] author and journalist Jeanne Carstensen and her book A Greek Tragedy…focuses on one of the most compelling, challenging, and important issues today: immigration. Space is limited, so buy your tickets now!”

For Carstensen, the impact of the refugee crisis is universal. Not only does it affect the refugees themselves, it affects everyone who encounters them, be they rescuers, journalists or their new European neighbors.

“...I realized seeing all those people crossing and how hard they were working to get to safety: these were middle-class people. I was meeting artists, journalists, doctors, farmers, people who had jobs in their society, whatever kinds of jobs they had. And I realized watching these people, ‘Wow, this could happen to any of us,’” Carstensen said.

She added, “[A]ny of us could find ourselves having to flee our homes, or we could find ourselves in a place where migrants or refugees are arriving and they need our help, and then we have to decide to turn towards people or turn away. And that’s the message of my book, just to think about how complex that is and how we would want to be in that situation.”

For more information about the upcoming event and to purchase tickets, visit seb.org/event/author-talk-jeanne-carstensen-michael-krasy.