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The saga began in mid-July 2022, when Giorgos Christides, a Greek reporter for the German newsmagazine Der Spiegel, began messaging someone who claimed to be one of about forty migrants stranded on a small islet somewhere in the middle of the Evros River, which forms a border between Greece and Turkey. The group was composed of men, women, and children, most of them from Syria. They were apparently trying to cross into Greece in order to seek protection on European soil. Among them was a five-year-old named Maria, who was traveling with her parents; her twin, Maya; and three siblings, Hassan, Ayah, and Hanin.

Some of the group members had reportedly ended up on the islet after the Greek authorities captured them on the mainland and forced them back into the river. Now they were stuck. It was brutally hot, and they had dwindling provisions and waning cell batteries. As close as they were to shore at certain points—less than the length of a soccer field—any attempt to swim across the river’s racing current could prove deadly. Please, they beseeched human-rights workers and journalists. They feared for their lives. Could someone help secure their rescue?

In a country of more than ten million people, in which more than one million refugees had arrived since the start of 2015, migration had become one of Christides’s central beats. Over the previous few years, the Greek government had amassed a long track record of human-rights abuses against migrants. As a result, Christides frequently received messages from people in desperate circumstances. This time, he happened to be on vacation by the sea with his wife and kids, who wished he would put away his phone. Still, Christides felt a responsibility to reply. To the chagrin of his family, he began a lengthy correspondence with the group.

In truth, if the refugees were indeed in Greece, only the authorities could have helped them to safety. The border region in which they were stranded was a heavily patrolled military zone; anyone who appeared to be helping a migrant reach Greece from Turkey could be charged with facilitating illegal entry, or abetting human smuggling. Besides, Christides was a journalist, not a humanitarian worker. All he could really do on the group’s behalf was reach out to officials and take to social media. “Greek authorities have their location,” he tweeted, “but as usual show no willingness to follow court orders. In a video call I had with a young girl from the group today, she took me through the Evros islet and begged for help.”

Christides had come into his own as an international journalist during the post-2008 Greek debt crisis, amid a surge of extreme nationalism. Mass refugee arrivals to the country began soon after. By 2022, he had been writing for Der Spiegel for a decade and had won numerous awards. He’d reported critically on both the left-wing Syriza government and the center-right New Democracy regime that took its place. He had been widely criticized by readers across the political spectrum. “I might be naïve,” he told me, “but I love Greece, and I believe that better systems are possible and that it’s important to hold the government accountable.”

It seemed likely that the Evros Thirty-eight, as the group would come to be known, were victims of what’s commonly called a “pushback.” In this practice, common in Greece, authorities remove groups of refugees, often violently, and force them back across the border—sometimes to their deaths. While such refoulement is prohibited under international law, thousands of pushbacks have been reported in the Aegean Sea, strandings just like the one in which the Evros Thirty-eight found themselves.

Besides contacting Christides, members of the group got in touch with a number of humanitarian organizations, including the Greek Council for Refugees and HumanRights360, which in turn informed authorities and demanded the refugees’ rescue. On July 20, nearly a week after the Evros Thirty-eight were first documented on the islet, these NGOs appealed to the European Court of Human Rights, which swiftly ordered the Greek government to rescue them. Journalists and advocates worked to confirm their location via metadata from the images they shared, trying to determine whether they were messaging from Greece or from Turkish territory. On July 25, two witnesses were able to take an audio recording of the group from the Greek side of the river. Still, the Greek authorities claimed they couldn’t find them.

Around this time, Christides posted a video. In it, the group spots a few men on the Greek side of the river, where a small boat has been pulled ashore. “I’m police! Police! I’m police!” one of the men yells. “Want the boat?” he asks. The refugees claimed that he later destroyed it and left it on the bank. They also said that masked men had come to the islet, beat the migrants, then transported them to the Greek mainland—but after several hours in detention, they were once more forced onto boats and taken to the Turkish side of the river. Eventually, the migrants said, Turkish authorities transported them to another nearby location. Several days later, they were back on the islet.

By then, Christides and others had been sharing the stranded group’s photos and messages on Twitter nearly every day, along with their locations. “There is NO excuse,” he wrote on July 25, “for [Greek] authorities to fail to respect the European Court of Human Rights’ order and rescue these people.” It now seemed that practically everyone in Greece had heard of the Evros Thirty-eight. One corner of Twitter was aflame with indignity that the government could so wickedly leave people to die. The other, hardened by years of refugee arrivals and a rise in xenophobic right-wing politics, was equally and oppositely incensed: these refugees could have stayed in Turkey and avoided their fate had they not been so greedy for Europe.

Days passed, and the group continued to send a deluge of dire messages to the people they thought could help them. “We are hungry and sick and insects have bitten our bodies,” one pleaded, and they sent photos of their wounds. Two of the group’s members had already drowned during the initial crossing, the refugees said. “My grandmother is crying and saying let me just die here,” a woman named Baidaa, who had become the group’s spokesperson, wrote to the organization Alarm Phone. “Why does no one want us? What is our fault, my friend, only because we are Syrians, we are rejected by everyone. Turkey deports us, and Greece beats us, deports us and is throwing us onto the islands. Our situation is miserable here. The situation here is tragic.”

Then, on August 9, more than three weeks after they were first reported to be on the islet, Baidaa sent sobbing voice messages: Two sisters, nine-year-old Ayah and five-year-old Maria, had been stung by scorpions and fallen ill. The elder sister was still alive, but Maria had died in the night. They sent photos of her body laid out stiffly on the brittle grasses, slightly blue in the face, eyes shut, pants pulled down to expose the fatal wound.

“I will never forgive this world,” Baidaa wrote to Alarm Phone. “Do you know the feeling of a father and mother when they lose a child . . . and their other child is fighting death in front of them?”

Still on vacation, Christides took in the messages. “SOS in Evros,” he posted on Twitter. “A small girl of 5 reported dead, another in critical condition.” Der Spiegel published his article the next day.

Like most national borders, the line dividing Greece and Turkey is relatively new. It was first conceived in Lausanne, Switzerland, in 1923, in the aftermath of the First World War. The border, as the Treaty of Lausanne defined it, would follow the median line between the main channel of the Evros River, which spills from the great Rila mountain range of Bulgaria, down through the hilly green borderlands of Greece and Turkey, and eventually into the northern Aegean. But the exact line wasn’t drawn by the countries until 1926; it took three years to determine the primary fork of the many-pronged waterway and to locate the exact middle of the river.

Unlike a fence, a river moves. “The idea of a natural border is a misconception,” Stefanos Levidis, a research fellow at the organization Forensic Architecture, told me. The mutable nature of border landscapes can pose political problems—like trying to keep track of where the line even is. In 1864, for instance, flooding shifted the course of the Rio Grande at the U.S.-Mexico border so dramatically that hundreds of acres of Mexican land were suddenly on the U.S. side of the river; only after much argument did the States return the land to Mexico a century later. The Evros is likewise changing all the time; new islets form and old ones erode away, creating what Levidis described as a “zone of territorial confusion,” used by both Greece and Turkey to abandon asylum seekers such as the Evros Thirty-eight. This mutability can be of political use.

When the Greek refugee crisis began in 2015, Syriza and the Greek people largely welcomed the migrants, who were arriving on inflatable boats and rickety fishing vessels from across the Mediterranean, numbering more than 850,000 in the first year. But over time, that welcoming spirit curdled. A crisis stays a crisis for only so long; the refugees landing in Greece morphed in the public imagination from innocents deserving of rescue into national nuisances. According to E.U. law, the country where a refugee first arrives is responsible for examining the asylum claim. Countries in Europe’s interior were effectively insulated from the surge, with countries on the southern perimeter, like Italy and Greece, serving as the de facto gateways to, and guardians of, Europe.

Early on in the crisis, the Greek government began detaining refugees on five “hot spot” islands in the Aegean, where asylum seekers would remain until they were approved. Only then would they be allowed entry into the interior of Greece and, potentially, continue onward to other parts of Europe. Resources were stretched thin on these islands as it was, and refugees were spending years stuck in camps as they waited for their cases to progress. It didn’t take long for the once-sympathetic newcomers to be cast as invaders.

By 2019, Syriza had failed to extricate Greece from its immense post-crash debt, and the New Democracy party swept local and national elections, installing Kyriakos Mitsotakis as prime minister. New Democracy had campaigned heavily on tough-on-border policies, and it has kept its promises while further stoking anti-migrant rhetoric. “Those who are not welcomed will be returned,” Mitsotakis said months after taking office in 2019. “We will permanently shut the door to illegal human traffickers, to those who want to enter although they are not entitled to asylum.” Since he took power, reports of pushbacks have dramatically increased—and early in his first term, the number of arrivals plummeted. (That period coincided with the pandemic, which also affected arrivals.) Polls make clear that New Democracy’s anti-migrant focus has resonated with a good portion of Greek society; the rest of Europe, the thinking goes, saddled them with not only generations of unpayable debt, but also an undue responsibility to manage migrants for the entire continent.

The surge also deepened the country’s centuries-long rift with Turkey, from which most refugees entering Greece, including the Evros Thirty-eight, launched their boats. In February of 2020, Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan flouted a long-standing agreement with Europe and opened its western borders, allowing thousands of people to attempt crossing in a matter of days. In response, Greece detained many new arrivals in prisonlike conditions and suspended their right to seek asylum. Authorities also used COVID restrictions to limit their freedoms, hemming them into the camps with limited services and preventing them from leaving. Then, in 2023, a migrant ship carrying some seven hundred and fifty people bound for Italy became stranded in waters off the coast of Pylos. The Hellenic Coast Guard first ignored the distress calls, and later, while allegedly trying to tow the vessel, caused the boat to tip, scattering those on deck into the sea and dooming the many stuck below. More than six hundred people drowned. This looked suspiciously like an effort to ensure that the people on the boat would not enter Greece.

A bombshell investigation in 2020 made clear that authorities from Frontex, the European border and coast guard agency, not only knew about Greek pushbacks and did nothing to stop them, but even witnessed and effectively participated in the acts alongside their Greek counterparts. It was Christides who broke that story, co-authored with several other journalists, in October 2020. The article contributed to a widespread notion within Greece: European powers may rhetorically criticize the country for its human-rights abuses, but they tacitly welcome—and even occasionally partake in—illegal efforts to secure the border. “If Frontex not only turned a blind eye to abuses committed under its sight, or worse, directly took part in them,” said Eva Cossé of Human Rights Watch in response to the report, “it becomes every European Union member state’s responsibility.” Nearly two years later, the chief of Frontex, Fabrice Leggeri, was forced to resign, in part as a result of the revelations in Christides’s reporting. (The agency said that its new management aims to “increase transparency” and “uphold fundamental rights.”)

But for the most part, Mitsotakis’s pushback regime has been met with little effective resistance. New Democracy was reelected in a landslide just weeks after those six hundred refugees died off Pylos. The party’s continued popularity has depended on two key ideas its members fomented within the Greek public: that Greece is taking on the bulk of responsibility compared with most other countries in Europe, and that many of the refugees coming over aren’t refugees at all, but opportunists. Many of these so-called refugees trying to enter Greece are liars, they suggest. And journalists and humanitarian workers are aiding and abetting those lies.

“Maria is dead,” Christides wrote in Der Spiegel. “She died at Europe’s external borders in early August because Greek authorities denied her all help.” He outlined the whole saga: the Evros Thirty-eight’s weeks of begging for help, officials’ refusal to rescue them, and the reports of a deadly scorpion sting. Later, members of the group would explain that the family buried the body near the riverbank. “The exact circumstances of Maria’s death have not yet been clarified,” he wrote. “What is certain is that her death could have been avoided, like so many deaths on the Evros.”

The story was picked up throughout Greece and around the world. Photographs of Maria circulated on the internet: a sweet-faced little girl with a bobbed haircut and yellow raincoat. Thanks in good part to Christides and the humanitarian organizations that had been trumpeting the cause of the Evros Thirty-eight, the Greek government’s deadly border practices—which tracked with a larger approach of inhumane treatment of refugees throughout the European Union—were exposed.

Though the Greek authorities had claimed that they couldn’t find the group, on August 11, the day after Christides’s piece was published, they suddenly changed tactics. They had managed to locate the refugees, they announced, but they couldn’t do anything to help them, because the islet belonged to Turkey. Their hands were tied; to rescue the refugees would exceed Greek jurisdiction. It was Turkey’s responsibility to rescue them, the Greek authorities claimed, but the Turkish authorities hadn’t seemed to budge, either.

Two facts further complicated matters: first, that the refugees had left the islet in question at least once—whether by choice or force is still not clear—and second, that the international border in fact cut through the islet, a fact that, owing in part to topographical changes, wasn’t obvious when looking at a map. Depending on which side of the islet the group stood on, they might be subject to a different country’s jurisdiction. Greece and Turkey, which for hundreds of years had been steeped in mutual acrimony and territorial disputes, were now willingly ceding land to each other in a game of geopolitical hot potato.

The image metadata indicated that the group had indeed been contacting journalists and NGOs from the Greek side, and nearly a week after Maria’s death was reported, the Evros Thirty-eight managed to secure a rubber dinghy—which they claimed other migrants had left for them—and crossed into the country. This time, under international scrutiny, and with the blood of a little girl on their hands, the Greeks did not push the group back across the border. Instead, they took them to a refugee camp in the town of Fylakio, the only closed camp in the region, meaning that refugees were not free to come and go.

On August 16, the Greek minister of migration and asylum, Notis Mitarachi, said in a public video address that the Greek government had immediately mobilized to rescue the group after learning that they were in Greek territory. He blamed the Turkish police for sending the group across the river, a “push forward,” as he put it, “which is completely illegal and is in breach of international law.” He then acknowledged the tragedy of Little Maria, as she came to be known in the press. “Sadly it appears that a girl aged 5 years old has lost her life in Turkish soils,” he said. “We will coordinate with the International Red Cross and Red Crescent to ensure that the body of this girl is brought to Greece to be buried with dignity by her family.”

Christides, back from vacation, traveled to Fylakio to meet with members of the group. They were housed in a drab camp in the agricultural hinterlands of northern Greece, a facility encircled by barbed wire and equipped to house around four hundred people but often holding far fewer, though refugees had complained of being shoved into a single room with more than ninety others as recently as 2018. When Christides arrived, the authorities wouldn’t let him in. But he was also a professional translator. He asked the legal team from HumanRights360 if he could accompany them inside under their auspices, and Der Spiegel allowed it.

Inside the camp, members of the group were being housed in structures that looked like antiseptic shipping containers. Christides sat in while attorneys interviewed Maria’s family and roughly a dozen other members of the Evros Thirty-eight. Each person recounted the same story: a little girl named Maria had been stung by a scorpion, fallen sick, and died.

Meanwhile, Christides’s article continued to circulate around the globe, and he published several additional articles with updates on the case. Der Spiegel had also released a podcast episode about it, in which one of the hosts asserted that he had never come across a case that “shows so symbolically what is going wrong in European migration policy.” The Greek authorities, the host said, “would rather watch a five-year-old girl die than allow two or three dozen refugees into the country and take them in.”

Then, on August 30, Mitarachi addressed Parliament. He noted the marked strides Greece had made in reducing migration flows, and in providing more adequate housing facilities for those seeking asylum since New Democracy took power. “Greece saves lives every day at our borders,” he said, “but Greece does not accept that we are the gateway for smuggling rings.” With this, he pivoted to the Evros Thirty-eight. Although just weeks before he’d issued his condolences, he now asserted that there were “significant inconsistencies” in the group’s stories—chief among them the fate of Little Maria.

“There is no photo or video of the child while sick,” he said, “of the burial site, the burial, etcetera.” And, as it turned out, only four children, not five, had been included on the list of people stranded on the islet that the Greek Council for Refugees had sent to the European Parliament. He was insinuating not only that she may not have died, but that the group may have invented her out of whole cloth. Maybe Maria had never existed at all.

There is perhaps no figure more rhetorically powerful than that of the dead or imperiled child. Governments know this; human-rights activists know this; and people in desperate circumstances know this, too. It was the United States’ policy of family separation that brought the brutalities of the country’s immigration system to widespread public attention. For more than a year, images of the children of Gaza—dead and limp in a parent’s arms, wailing at the death of their obliterated loved ones, limbless or starving—have shouldered the task of proving Israel’s genocide. And it was the image of the lifeless Alan Kurdi, a two-year-old Syrian boy in a red T-shirt, whose body washed ashore in Turkey after a 2015 shipwreck en route to Greece, that mobilized people on behalf of refugees attempting to cross the Mediterranean. “He had a name: Aylan [sic] Kurdi,” the French prime minister tweeted. “Urgent action required—a Europe-wide mobilization is urgent.” The image of Kurdi, dead and face down in the sand, soon became a somber meme—one that, for a while, helped garner widespread sympathy and financial support for refugees landing by the thousands on Greece’s shores.

For years, the Greek government had carried out pushbacks with frequency and near-total impunity. Little Maria, stiff and blue on European soil, became the perfect symbol of the Greek government’s violent border practices on behalf of “fortress Europe.” Now that same government was casting doubt on Maria’s death—on Maria’s very existence.

Soon after Mitarachi’s stunning address, the authorities continued to publicly cast doubt on the family’s story. Two witnesses from among the Evros Thirty-eight said they had lied to Greek officials about Maria’s death. A Greek magazine published an article, widely read throughout the country, laying out the government’s case and cementing the state’s version of events.

The authorities focused in particular on discrepancies in the list of names that Mitarachi had mentioned in Parliament. In order to make an appeal for rescue in the European courts, attorneys had to provide an account of the beneficiaries. Their list indicated only four children in Maria’s family—Maria, Hanin, Hassan, and Ayah. The exclusion of Maria’s supposed twin, Maya, cast doubt on whether there had been a twin; all four children could have been alive and well with their parents in Greece. But at least one other refugee was also left off the list. As Lefteris Papagiannakis of the Greek Council for Refugees explained to me, the document had been assembled in haste; every minute counted. Whatever the case, it ended up creating an evidentiary hole that helped bolster the government’s side of the story.

The family eventually furnished proof from Syria that they indeed had five children. Records of the three youngest—Maria, but also Maya and Hanin—were not registered with the Syrian government until November 2022, months after the rescue. In war-torn Syria, it is common for births not to be registered immediately; by the same token, it’s possible for families to obtain official documents for a child they don’t actually have. But what about the fact that the family could furnish no photos of the seven of them as a group? When a family flees a country in conflict, they often leave such things behind. Plus, the family added, the Greeks had confiscated their phone, which contained all their photos.

There was also the matter of the pictures sent from the islet; some believed that the group had used the living five-year-old girl to stage photos faking the death, and then cast her as the surviving “twin” once rescued. Finally, there were the scorpion stings. When the elder sister, Ayah, who the group said had also been stung, was taken in for a medical examination, the doctors reported no evidence of this. Death by scorpion in the region was rare.

Right-wing Greek pundits and elected officials seized on the family’s alleged lies. “They baptized the dead 5-year-old Maria to commemorate the feast of Our Lady,” tweeted an account with more than eighty thousand followers, referring to the date of their rescue, August 15, which coincided with the annual Greek Orthodox celebration of Mary; “Russians, Turks and aliens want to destabilize our government with their agents, the opposition and the foreign media.” Prime Minister Mitsotakis himself alluded to the Maria saga during a parliamentary debate. “Right now in Evros, an invasion is being staged under humanitarian guise,” he said.

“Maria’s parents spoke heartbreakingly of their daughter,” Christides wrote as the scandal unfolded. “Unlike politicians or others, I will not question them.” But the situation was doing no favors for reporters, who were already under fire in Greece. Public approval of journalists had been plummeting in recent years; even before the Little Maria case, Greeks had grown increasingly suspicious about whether reporters were working, intentionally or unwittingly, at the behest of Greece’s enemies, especially Turkey. Reporters who exposed Greece’s dirty laundry to the world were a nuisance to the Greek government, which, having nearly lost its place in the euro zone after 2008, already had to vie for legitimacy on the world stage. Journalists critical of government policy routinely faced smearing in state-friendly media, threats of lawsuits from government officials, and even government surveillance. In 2022, the country ranked 108th in the Reporters Without Borders World Press Freedom Index—the lowest in Europe. Mitarachi tweeted that “the journalist in question”—Christides—“consciously chose to mock the Greek authorities.”

The trolls soon came after Christides. “NGOs, ‘rescuers’ and ‘journalists’ who help and guide illegal immigrants through electronic means to enter the country should face the same criminal treatment as traffickers!” one wrote. “Mr Erdogan  is very proud of you,” wrote another. “You deserve additional payment for accomplishing your mission.” One person even posted a photo of Maria next to photos of various other girls being evacuated from war zones, suggesting she was merely a crisis actor.

The Little Maria controversy did no favors for human-rights activists, either, whom the government liked to paint as feckless—or even as smugglers masquerading as do-gooders. The New Democracy government had worked hard to discredit NGOs in the public eye, even attempting to prosecute staffers from organizations that worked with migrants, while creating remarkable administrative hurdles in their work. In 2018, twenty-four humanitarian workers who had been based on the island of Lesbos were arrested and indicted on a host of charges, including human smuggling and espionage, for which there was no credible evidence. In 2024, the Norwegian activist Tommy Olsen, who runs a website documenting pushbacks, was charged with forming a “criminal organization” and “facilitating the entry” of migrants into Greece.

The Maria case was thus the perfect trifecta for New Democracy: Look, the government could say, this is proof. Refugees lie. Journalists lie. Humanitarian workers lie. The parents had invented the child, the scorpion sting, and the islet burial in order to manipulate the Greeks into letting them in, and human-rights organizations and journalists had broadcast the fraud to all the world. “I will not return to this macabre and disgusting discussion,” Christides wrote. “After all, for the Greek authorities, the refugees initially did not even exist, they were creatures of the imagination of journalists and NGOs.”

Without a body, it was impossible to know for certain whether Maria was a fiction. Given the size of the islet and the river’s current, her body could have been washed away. NGO workers said they wouldn’t put it past members of either government to have removed the body as part of a cover-up. Weeks after their rescue, Maria’s parents requested their daughter’s exhumation, but when Greek authorities asked for more details about where the body was located, the family dropped the pursuit. Some observers spun this as further proof that they had been lying all along; others saw it as bereaved parents, exhausted by their traumatic ordeal, opting to let their daughter rest in peace rather than jump through painful bureaucratic hurdles. Meanwhile, the witnesses from the Evros Thirty-eight who told the government that they had lied about Maria recanted within a matter of weeks, telling NGO workers that the opposite had been true: facing government pressure, they’d lied about lying.

Whatever the case, many of the advocates I spoke with were frustrated by the public’s fixation on the girl to begin with, including my own for the purposes of writing this story. The saga of the Evros Thirty-eight was not simply the case of a single lost life, but demonstrative of the system of illegal pushbacks the Greek government had been pursuing for years in order to curb migration. “If people choose instead to focus on whether a five-year-old died,” Papagiannakis of the Greek Council for Refugees told me, “that’s on them.”

There are some things that are certainly true: there was a group of refugees trapped in the Evros, desperate for the help they qualified for under international law, European law, and Greek law. In spite of this, they were abandoned. Both versions of the Maria story are tragedies. If Maria was an invention, she was concocted by a desperate group whose members wondered what it took to be saved, and who had learned from the media’s responses to other humanitarian disasters. Dozens of stranded people, pleading not to die, had not been enough. Maybe a dead little girl would do the trick?

As time went on, the idea of the lying refugee proved more powerful than the dead or imperiled one. By August and September 2022, the Greek media was still astir with articles about the Evros Thirty-eight, many vilifying Der Spiegel and Christides for reporting the refugees’ supposed lies. The NGOs, too, were under pressure. On September 15, the director of HumanRights360 emerged with a mea culpa, claiming—despite evidence to the contrary—that the refugees had not been in Greek territory, and that Christides had entered Fylakio on his own, without help from the organization. The lead lawyer working on behalf of the Evros Thirty-eight, Evgenia Kouniaki, had resigned from her staff position at HumanRights360, though she continued to represent them as an independent lawyer at no charge.

Eventually, authorities threatened to “take all necessary legal action” against Christides for entering the refugee camp under false pretenses. In response, dozens of journalists and humanitarian workers spoke up to support him, including his Der Spiegel colleague Maximilian Popp, who denounced the charges as attacks on press freedom, and who called Christides “one of the most professional and dedicated journalists” he had ever met. Then Mitarachi wrote a letter to Der Spiegel’s editor in chief condemning the reporting and Christides.

The Der Spiegel editors decided to launch an investigation into their own story. The publication was just emerging from a scandal in which one of its star German reporters admitted to falsifying much of his reporting over the years, and editors had taken pains to recover their reputation in the wake of the scandal. They removed the articles on Maria from Der Spiegel’s website, and after the fallout, Christides never wrote for the outlet again. Each time I reached out to Christides, he insisted he couldn’t comment on the details of the Maria case, and directed me to inquire with Der Spiegel instead. Representatives for Der Spiegel told me that they were not able to comment further on the results of their internal review or any staffing matters, and that they had “not imposed any legal obligations” on Christides or anyone else who might speak about this case to the public.

The magazine published the results of its investigation in the final days of 2022. The editors provided a play-by-play of the evidence and verified much of Christides’s reporting, though they pointed out various errors and cast doubt on some of the group’s claims and members: Baidaa, for example, who posted a TikTok video of a plane taking off from Athens not long after being rescued in Greece. The video, since deleted, was captioned in Arabic: “I have arrived in Germany. It was a long struggle.” She hadn’t been awarded asylum in Greece, but without papers, she wouldn’t have been allowed to board the plane.

It turned out that Christides’s original article hadn’t been thoroughly fact-checked before publication, as was common for pieces published exclusively online. Buried within the investigation is a key line:

While the original English version carefully reports on the child’s death in several places in the subjunctive (“She is reported dead,” “the group says Maria died”), in the German version everything is in the indicative at the end.

With a bit of parsing, the message is clear: Christides filed his article with the appropriate caveats, but his editors turned Maria’s death into a semantic certainty.

In mid-November, the Der Spiegel team undertaking the investigation met with the family in the northern Greek town of Drama, near the refugee camp to which they’d been relocated. Of the meeting, they wrote: “The parents can no longer remember exactly where the child is buried and do not have any photos that can prove her existence—not even from the past.” Until this point in the report, the investigators are antiseptic in their recounting of things, writing at a considerable remove. But when it comes to the family, they suddenly veer into a subjective, personal voice. Before the meeting, they report, the family went to get photos taken for their new identity papers. “They have not yet received their documents,” the report reads. “The fear and mistrust that something could still go wrong is evident.” The family speaks to Der Spiegel for more than an hour, but, the investigators write, “nevertheless, the doubts about their story are not dispelled in the end.” Although they acknowledge that they have no proof one way or another, the evidence, combined with some kind of intuition, seems to tell them that these people are lying.

Christides has since gone on to win major journalistic awards in the European Union, but the incident was clearly a stain on his illustrious career. “He was the native,” a Greek person familiar with the case told me. “He was the local, expendable guy” taking the fall for Der Spiegel’s mistakes. Maria’s case damaged other working relationships too; as a result of its statement of apology, the Greek Council for Refugees refuses to work with HumanRights360 or appear at any event at which representatives of the organization will be in attendance. Forensic Architecture, which conducts spatial and media analysis on behalf of communities affected by state violence, sometimes in partnership with various media organizations, has not worked with Der Spiegel on migration issues since the scandal.

Now, more than two years after the Evros Thirty-eight made landfall on the islet, Little Maria is practically a household name, synonymous with refugees’ immorality and the malfeasance of NGOs and journalists. As Levidis sees it, the little girl has become a “narrative trap” for anything to do with refugees. “Now they’ve established that they hold the truth,” he said of the government, “and everybody who speaks against border violence in support of refugees is at best a useful idiot to create well-designed propaganda unleashed by the Turks.” Papagiannakis agreed. He told me that the government uses the story as a shield anytime it is attacked for its criminal policies. “Every time I’m on TV with the deputy minister [of migration],” he said, “when she’s cornered, in the end, she breaks out Maria.”

To this day, the parents, Mohammed and Maryam, contend through attorneys that they had a daughter named Maria, who died on the islet and whom they buried in the sand. Many eyewitnesses confirmed their story in hearings before the Greek asylum authority in Fylakio. If it had been a ruse, it was a well-orchestrated, remarkably consistent, and well-acted one.

Last spring, with Kouniaki’s help, the Greek Council for Refugees filed a case against the Greek and Turkish governments in the European Council for Human Rights for pushing back the Evros Thirty-eight. A ruling is forthcoming. This, the organization hopes, will transform the story yet again into one of grave injustice on the part of the Greek government, whatever the truth about Maria. But the government holds strong. “The story about the little girl that you are attempting to bring back to light does not hold up,” Romina Xida, a representative from the press office of the Hellenic Ministry of Migration and Asylum, told me. “It has been proven to be fake news.”

It’s tempting to see this as a story about a dead girl, or about a lie, or about Christides’s ostracization or Kouniaki’s resignation. These are familiar narratives, after all: heavily plotted and full of victims and villains, depending on how they’re told. But the story is also about impunity, which is always a function of silence.

I tried to get in touch with the family. I didn’t harbor any foolish expectation of cracking the case, or any desire to confront the parents with the most obvious and futile of questions: Was Maria real or a lie? I wanted only to meet them and see whether they had anything to say. But after months of attempts, I accepted that they weren’t interested. Why talk to a reporter? I imagine them asking themselves. What good would it do now? One could read their silence in any number of ways: as a sign of mourning, as a sign of guilt, or simply as a sign of wanting to exit the story that had ensnared them.

On July 25, 2022, when the refugees had been stranded in the Evros for nearly two weeks, two Greeks ventured as close as they could to the militarized border zone, armed with recording devices. This was remarkably risky; had they been caught, they could have been detained and even criminally charged. But they wanted to prove the existence and location of these refugees—a group that the government, with its denials, kept erasing. The two made their way toward the river, as close to the coordinates the group had shared as they could get. They turned on their recording devices and messaged the group to let them know they were nearby.

It would be another three weeks before the Evros Thirty-eight were rescued—a period during which a child might or might not have died. That day, though, the refugees assembled on the sandy slope of the islet, squatting between the river and the tall green brush. One of the group members began filming. After a count of three, they yelled together into the great void of Greece: “Heeeooooooooo.” The Greeks, concealed and crouching on the Greek side, captured the audio: “Heeeooooooooo,” a little scratchy, echoey, and a considerable distance away. But the group was there—right there. Clear as day. The recording ends with some cicadas and the wind blowing through the brush. Then, there is only silence.