Yesterday, August 29, the sixth consecutive uprising took place at the Greek Police’s migrant-refugee detention center in Sintiki, Serres, and many people attempted to escape amidst rock throwing with the guards. Just a week earlier, on August 22, at the same “closed facility” in the Kleidi area of Sintiki, Serres, the fifth consecutive uprising by detained migrants since November 2025 took place. The official state racist narrative begins with rock throwing, the damage, the clashes, and the arrests. The reality begins with the prolonged and endless confinement in a hellhole organized by the Greek Police for over 700 people and their struggle for life and freedom.
After a stone-throwing clash with the police and once the fence was cut, on August 22, 40 people escaped from the Sintiki hellhole. In the days that followed, there were numerous arrests, however, 15 people have managed to escape. Twenty-three of those arrested were sentenced to more than two years in prison, with the prosecution acknowledging the appalling conditions at the facility as a mitigating factor during the trial.
The Sintiki camp is divided into two sections: the Controlled Temporary Accommodation Facility for Asylum Seekers, which, in theory, is an open structure, and the Special Detention Facility, which is a closed facility under the institutional authority of the Greek police. In the first months of 2025, approximately 500 refugees were registered at the Sintiki camp, while as of September 2025, the population had risen to over 700, mainly from Egypt and Bangladesh—far exceeding the camp’s capacity. The Sintiki camp is a prison where refugees are crammed into inhumane conditions, a full embodiment of the Greek state’s anti-refugee policies.
For over a year now, the Sintiki camp has been a central pillar of this policy, just like the “pre-departure” detention center in Corinth. The Greek state forces more than 700 migrants to live in inhumane conditions, crammed into shipping containers at a density of nearly one person per square meter, at the mercy of either winter temperatures of -10°C or the summer heat, surrounded by snakes, mice, and insects, with only four toilets and minimal, poor-quality food, and this situation coupled with the climate of terror created by daily police patrols and beatings (since the facility is run entirely by the Greek police) has led to incidents of attempted suicide. Month after month, the Greek government continues to detain them beyond the six-month period and without allowing them to effectively exercise their right to asylum.
The August 22 uprising by detained migrants in Sintiki is a just act of resistance and an exercise of the universal human right to freedom in the face of the racist and colonial system of detention centers, which uses their confinement and torture to exemplify deterrence policies. As Thanos Plevris once said, “When you’re over here, you won’t receive any social benefits, you won’t be able to eat, you won’t be able to drink, and you won’t be able to go to a hospital”. At the same time, their just resistance is being used to further reinforce the Greek state’s racist narrative, portraying the rebelling migrants as a threat to the safety of Greek citizens. In the municipality of Sintiki, the local city council is calling for the closure of the facility to halt “the deterioration of the area”. The population of Sintiki has declined by more than 1/3 since 2001 and it is one of the poorest municipalities in the country. Who is to blame for this, the migrants who are subjected to confinement and dehumanization in the concentration camp, or the successive governments that drove the local residents to emigrate?
The new uprising is not some “problem” that can be solved simply by improving conditions within the closed facility (how much can a prison really be improved?), or solely by closing it (that is, reopening it at a new location). All detention centers in Greece must be abolished, and there must be immediate access to the asylum process without the prior punitive experience of detention. Migrants in the detention centers are asking for nothing more than their inalienable right to live with dignity and freedom.
At the same time, the uprising is not merely a result of the “despair” generated by conditions in the camp, but an emphatic affirmation of life in the face of the Greek state’s politics of death. This is why the struggle against the detention hellhole in Sintiki is one of the most vivid examples of resistance against the ever-increasing fascistization of Greek society and the death politics of colonial capitalism within the Greek state. For all the reasons in the world we stand in solidarity with the just struggle of the migrants in Sintiki.