The northeastern Aegean island of Lesvos, a place of quiet beauty, storied history, and sacred shrines, had long drawn the attention of tourists, though never quite the hordes of off-islanders that descended each summer onto some of its much smaller, but far more notorious, Cycladic neighbors to the southwest. Its reputation as the bird-watching capital of Europe, possessing the greatest array of wildflowers in Greece and one of the world's largest petrified forests, drew a different sort of tourist.

Lesvos ranked as the third largest of Greece's islands, behind Crete and Evia, with roughly one-third of its eighty-six thousand inhabitants living in its capital city of Mytilini, an alternative name used by many Greeks for the island. Most Greeks, though, knew very little about modern Lesvos and thought of it, if at all, as little more than the serene agrarian home of Greece's ouzo and sardine industries.

That abruptly changed in 2015.

Virtually overnight, thousands of men, women, and children fleeing the terrors of their homelands flooded daily out of Turkey across the three-and-a-half to ten-mile-wide Mytilini Strait onto Lesvos. Tourists, who'd come to holiday on the island's northern shores, found themselves sitting on the verandas of their beachfront hotels, drinking their morning coffee, watching in horror as an armada of dangerously overloaded boats desperately struggled to reach land.

Inevitably, tourists stopped coming.

But not the refugees, for they saw no choice but to come, no matter the predators waiting for them along the way: profiteers poised to make billions of euros off the fears and aspirations of desperate souls willing to pay, do, or risk whatever they must for the promise of a better, safer existence. In 2015, more than a half million asylum-seeking migrants and refugees passed through Lesvos, looking to make their way to other destinations in the European Union (EU).

The chaos of the modern world had spun out a rushing storm of profit for human traffickers of every stripe, and Lesvos sat dead center in its path.

* * *

The sea had always been Mihalis Volandes' friend. He'd been born to it, the same as to his fortune. His father and father before him were islanders who knew the value of owning ships and trading in oil. They stood as part of the Greek elite, protected by the nation's laws and by his countrymen's enduring pride in their tiny country's dominant role on the shipping world stage. The unpleasant fact that little of the shipping industry's revenues ever made its way back to Greece was politely accepted as the nation's cost for maintaining those bragging rights.

Mihalis lived in Kioski, one of Mytilini's old aristocratic neighborhoods, tucked between the new harbor to the south and the 1,500-year-old castle dominating the city's northeast border with the sea. He'd lived through many changes to his island and accepted or ignored most as a part of living in modern times.

One change, though, he could not bring himself to accept or ignore: refugees. Greece had not experienced immigration of the current magnitude since the early 1920s, when 1.2 million Greek Orthodox Christians were expelled from Turkey, an event to which most residents of Lesvos traced their ancestors.

He realized early on what had triggered his nation's modern migration deluge. Under Greece's prior government, the Greek Coast Guard intercepted and turned refugee boats back to Turkey, but in early 2015, Greece's new government ordered its Coast Guard to allow refugee boats to pass into Greece. Germany's later announcement that it would accept one million Syrian refugees that year made what followed inevitable. From that moment on, it would have been irrational for those caught up in war, Syrian or otherwise, to remain in danger rather than risk a journey toward the promised peace and security of a new life in northern Europe.

Mihalis had joined many of his neighbors in doing what they could to help lessen the suffering of the refugees, as did many tourists and off-islanders, but the onslaught soon overwhelmed them. With the arrival of the international media and their cameras, a world outcry arose, bringing non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in to fill the void left by the confluence of EU political paralysis, and Greece's obvious inability to bear the financial burden of caring for hundreds of thousands of new arrivals, while so many of its own eleven million citizens struggled in the depths of a Great Depression-like economic crisis.

Mihalis saw the NGOs' efforts as admirable but severely wanting in both coordination and execution. What troubled him most was the utter absence of an organized plan for addressing the chronic problem of processing and humanely caring for the masses fleeing to safety in Europe by sea.

Threatened bureaucrats entrenched in doing things their own way feared such change. Worried elected officials concerned with playing to their voters wanted no such plan. And, for sure, human traffickers and their allies, who profited from the status quo, didn't want one.

Mihalis saw patience wearing thin on all sides, represented most dramatically in the riots and fires breaking out in the islands' detention centers. Someone had to come up with a broader vision, one that looked beyond short-term expediencies. So Mihalis did just that, with an idea that struck at the heart of the highly lucrative refugee smuggling business.

He presented his plan to various government authorities, each time receiving a polite thank you from shortsighted apparatchiks who had no intention of considering the proposal but dared not offend someone of Mihalis' stature and influence.

Now, though, with the world even more at war with itself, and no end in sight to the masses fleeing for safer shores, he hoped those capable of instituting change might be more amenable to adopting a sensible, dignified process for integrating refugees into their societies. It struck him as sheer madness to blindly adhere to practices that only engendered anger, resentment, and distrust across generations of souls soon to be part of European society — or returned to their homelands with attitudes forever shaped by their experiences.

But, then again, madness seemed to be in fashion.

Mihalis had spent the day on the neighboring island of Chios, the place of his birth and origin of his family's shipping fortune, trying to stir up support among shipowner friends. He would need their cooperation for his plan to work, and with Chios also a prime target of refugee smugglers, he hoped to get it. For the most part, his friends were receptive to his ideas, and though he would have preferred wild enthusiasm, he sensed they'd ultimately come on board.

It had been a long day, and rough seas made the boat ride back from Chios take longer than expected. His walk from the harbor along the ramble of cobbled and paved streets twisting back toward the old castle also took him longer than usual, but then again, he was tired.

"Whatever," he mumbled as he approached his home. Things finally seemed to be looking up for his project. But if, yet again, no one listened and the situation continued to deteriorate, he could always move to any number of other places in the world. They'd welcome him with open arms, a refugee possessing great wealth. That didn't strike him as fair, but he was a realist — something he wished he could call the EU and his own...