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It's not the same. Taking a chance to cross the Aegean (which is really a short boat ride) is not half as risky as compared to staying at home and having to deal with the crazies of ISIS. If those boats used by those smugglers were half decent then crossing from Turkey to Samos or Lesvos should be really really easy. I've been to both islands and from some areas you can really see that Turkey is really close. In good weather conditions I could easily swim this distance myself, and I'm not an athlete or anything.

Well put by Speigel.

Dream on if you think that Turkey will be taking back any of those poor souls. In the meantime, in the real world, Greece is still receiving wave after wave of immigrants in the islands of Samos and Lesvos, despite the terrible weather conditions lately. I'm afraid that we'll be seeing more and more of these people dying over the next few months because of bad weather conditions during the winter months. This is a humanitarian crisis of epic proportions and I don't see anyone finding any easy solutions any time soon.

I think that the Germans take these things seriously and some heads are going to roll. Despite all the fun we poke here, you have to agree that the Germans have the mechanisms in place to find and punish the culprits of this scandal. If this would have happened in Greece, Italy, Turkey or some other Mediterranean country I'd be pretty certain that there would be massive cover ups.

Interesting read: http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/10/23/iceland-where-bankers-go-to-jail-for-74-years.html

When I read the title I thought you were going to talk about the Black Sabbath album Heaven and Hell (great album by the way... ).

What would you like to know about these centres? If you can read/understand Greek then you can find all the info you need here: http://www.kep.gov.gr/portal/page/portal/kep

Same here

Exactly, that's the way most of these Greek "cooks" learnt how to cook. However, watching your grandma cook doesn't make you a cook qualified to serve food to thousands of people over the course of years

Most Greeks here in Canada started as dishwashers and they slowly evolved into cooks and then restaurant owners. Now how one goes from a dishwasher to becoming a cook without getting any proper training, this is a question nobody has answered properly yet

It's good for the Germans to see what their Greek colleagues had to deal with over the past few years...

http://www.express.co.uk/news/world/612015/Asylum-seekers-SUE-Germany-for-not-paying-them-benefits-FAST-ENOUGH

Sorry to break your bubble, but this is the real photo of eyo

Just joking around prettyque. You can try our Facebook and Twitter pages too: http://www.facebook.com/Hellenism.net https://twitter.com/#!/HellenismNet

That would be a good ideas, as long as a requirement for a report would be to provide adequate proof of wrongdoing.

It's going to be years before all legal battles are done. Also, I see no real story here. What would the story line be? Crooked German business people cheated the world to make more money? Not much of story there...

The Greek genealogy database is up and running again for anyone interested to add their names in it: http://www.hellenism.net/personal/gen.cgi

Interesting and timely article about the Turkish "deep state": http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/the-turkish-deep-state-what-life-is-like-when-the-conspiracy-is-real

You touched on an issue close to the heart of eyoismos I'll let him reply to this.

That's right, this is called meandros (Μαίανδρος) in Greek. It allegedly took its name from Meandros river in Asia Minor (ancient Miletus area).

I use Windows 10 at home. I haven't seen any issues with it yet. Saying this, I've never had any issues with any of the previous versions of Windows either, so I may not be the right person to ask

Don't underestimate the people's internal thoughts and motives which we, as outsiders, know very little about. I've met quite a few "Turks" in my professional life, all over Canada and the US. Most of them professionals and immigrants to the US or Canada like myself. I was very surprised to find out that most of them were not introducing themselves as "Turks" but as something else. Other than the obvious Kurds and Armenians (and a few who claimed Greek ancestry when they found out I'm Greek) I heard some pretty weird backgrounds, such as Assyrians (at least a couple), and Dagestani (when someone told me he was a Dagestani I had to Google that one to find out where these people were from as I had never heard this before). In any case, seems that Turkey is not as homogenous as many people think. According to Wikipedia at least 30% of Turkey's population belongs to some minority (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minorities_in_Turkey) even though from talking to some of the Turks I've met their estimate is that this percentage is much higher. In a society like this it may take just a spark to start a fire. This spark could be a bombing in a demonstration, or some killing of an important person, or who knows what. On your question around how would I see Turkey splitting up. I'm not sure. I'm not an expert in the area and I don't know much about all this people's histories, background and struggles, to know how they'd react in certain situations and what they'd request. An obvious division would be between the "European" side of Turkey (Istanbul area and the Aegean coast) and central Turkey, while the far east may become Kurdistan or part of a Kurdish territory which will include lands from Iraq too after they clean up ISIS. Who knows how things will play out. It goes without saying that Russia wouldn't want a strong Turkey in the area and they'd be more than happy to see them losing some of their lands and power. I don't really know what the US or the Europeans would want to see in the area. I'd assume that a large and strong Turkey scares all of them so they too would be more than happy to see a division of power in that area. Again, I'm not an expert in these things, I'm just an observer of historical events, and history, more often than not, repeats itself.

Did I say anything about any part of present day Turkey joining Greece? I only talked about the possibility of Turkey changing drastically in the next few years. There's the more secular west and the less secular east. And then there's the Kurds and some other smaller ethnic groups which may start seeing opportunities for independence within a different Turkey.

The end of Erdogan will be the end of the neo-Ottoman Turkey and possibly the beginning of a different - possibly fragmented - and more democratic Turkey. In the meantime, people have taken to the streets yet again: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/oct/11/turkey-bomb-blasts-ankara-mourning-scores-killed Next month's elections in Turkey will show what direction the country will take in the future.