Nameless
graves
Even so, the graves of those who die on the move are filling up many of Europe’s cemeteries along the border. Our team of reporters traveled to cemeteries in Spain, Italy, Greece, Croatia, Bosnia, Serbia, Poland and Lithuania to count the dead.
We found 1,931 graves of migrants, of which 1,015 were unidentified, buried within the last ten years. There are likely thousands more.
Illustration by Antoine Bouraly.
140+ unknown bodies.
On the Greek island of Lesvos, the official municipal cemetery filled up back in 2015, when large numbers of people began crossing to the island on rickety boats. Many who drowned were swept to shore by the waves.
Bodies languished in refrigerated containers for months before the city began burying bodies in an olive grove near the village of Kato Tritos.
This grave is one of 147 unmarked graves we counted one-by-one, although the full number was difficult to tell with the overgrowth of weeds. This one is marked only by a stick jutting from yellow dirt.
Update: In April of this year, the municipality of Lesvos allowed the NGO Earth Medicine to redesign the cemetery, after months of proposals and lobbying. The cemetery in Kato Tritos is now an orderly site of 200 gray slabs with information about the deceased clearly listed.
unknown 30-year-old
man.
The body of a 30-year-old man thought to be from Africa was recovered from the swampy forest on the Poland-Belarus border in 2021. Reaching subzero temperatures in the winter, most die of hypothermia. In the Polish village of Bohoniki, his final resting place is a grave marked N.N. (No Name) sitting on a wooded hill.
Humanitarian groups in Poland, including Grupa Granica (“Border Group” in Polish) and Podlaskie Humanitarian Emergency Service (POPH), have documented 52 deaths on the Poland-Belarus border since 2021.
three young men.
In December 2022, three bodies were found at the River Sava, which marks the border between Serbia and Croatia. Two had died of hypothermia, one had drowned. Recovered identification cards indicated they were three young men from Afghanistan: Ahmed Abozari, 17; Basir Naseri, 21; and Shakir Atoin, 25, from Afghanistan.
Their graves, marked “N.N.,” sit beside a field along a country road in Šice, a Croatian village of 230 inhabitants. Nobody has written their names on their graves, and it is unknown whether attempts were made to contact their families.
13+ unknown bodies.
The Sidi Guarach cemetery of Melilla sits on a hill on the Spanish border, and on the other side of the valley lies Morocco.
The cemetery staff tell us most people buried here drowned trying to swim to Melilla, a Spanish enclave on the African continent, a remnant of Spanish colonization of Morocco. Thirteen graves are marked "desconocido," or unknown, but the cemetery staff tell us many more are entirely unmarked.
66 unknown bodies.
Seventy one people who lost their lives in the Mediterranean are buried at the Piano Gatta cemetery of Agrigento, 66 of them without names.
Many were victims of the October 3, 2013 shipwreck off Lampedusa, in which at least 368 perished. What was recovered of peoples' bodies are scattered in cemeteries across the Sicilian landscape of sun-drenched hills and shadowed tombs.
Dozens of families that survive them gather every year, organized by the Italian NGO Comitato 3 Ottobre, to visit the graves and remember the dead.
130+ unknown bodies.
There are over 400 graves of migrants in the hilltop Doğançay Cemetery in coastal Izmir, Turkey, with more than 130 burials lacking a name. The cemetery has dedicated Lot no. 412 as a "migrant section" of the cemetery, next to a section for local orphans.
Many lose their lives attempting to cross the Aegean Sea to the Greek islands, and the bodies wash up on both sides of the sea. In the first quarter of 2024, over 3,800 people have made the journey.
"No Name No. 18."
Overlooking the Drina River between Bosnia and Serbia, many graves of migrants are marked with a smattering of wooden stakes and crosses, which decay in a matter of years.
Local activist Nihad Suljić has been arranging with the city for the wooden markings to be gradually replaced with marble headstones so that they will continue to exist for the family members who may one day come searching for their loved ones.
According to Bosnian officials, 45 bodies have so far been pulled from the Drina River. Around two dozen are buried here.
an unknown body.
In a grassy field, separate from the rows of graves in the cemetery of Białowieża on the Poland-Belarus border, are two lone graves of migrants.
This anonymous resting place was a mound of dirt until activists arrived to bury the body of another migrant in 2023, to find another mound already present. They added an extra name plate reading "N.N." (Latin for nomen nescio, name unknown) for the anonymous grave. It is unknown whether any funerary rites were conducted for the anonymous migrant.
Humanitarian groups in Poland, including Grupa Granica (“Border Group” in Polish) and Podlaskie Humanitarian Emergency Service (POPH), documented 52 deaths on the Poland-Belarus border between 2021 and 2023.
11 unknown bodies.
This mass grave for 11 people reads: "In memory of the migrants who died in the waters of the Strait." It is one of Spain's earliest mass graves for people who lost their lives in the waters between Spain's southern coast and Africa's northern coast in a 1988 shipwreck. From Tarifa, on a clear day, the African coast is visible in the distance.
14+ unknown bodies.
When two women traveled from Switzerland to pay respects at their sister's grave in 2021, they found the grave was gone.
The municipality of Agrigento, on the Italian island of Sicily, had moved the remains of many migrants "who had never been identified" into a mass grave, a discovery that outraged many families. This violated Italian law, which states that grave plots should not be exhumed and moved for 99 years.
Today, 17 individual grave stones remain, 14 of which simply read: "Victim of the Mediterranean Sea."
