Lampedusa: Honouring the migrants who died at sea

In a quiet corner of Lampedusa cemetery retired professor, Fabio Giovanetti waters plants and tidies rubbish from the graves of migrants of who have died crossing the Mediterranean Sea. “We have never seen or met these people, none of them have given us their name or their story. We don't know anything, but they are still human beings who had the misfortune to encounter a shipwreck,” he says.

Lampedusa is the gateway to Europe for the thousands of migrants who cross the Mediterranean every year. This small island in the middle of the sea has for decades welcomed anyone who arrives, alive or dead, after the long journey to the European coasts. In 2024 the Italian Red Cross welcomed over 45,000 people. More than 9,000 people have already arrived in Lampedusa in 2025. Some of those who don't survive the sea journey and whose story ends here in Lampedusa, are buried in the local cemetery. Often little is known about them, sometimes their name is known, sometimes not even that. Giovanetti, is a member of the Forum Lampedusa Solidale, a group of citizens who help those in need on the island, local and migrant alike.

Every migrant grave in this small cemetery tells a story. The Forum volunteers decided to decorate them with writings and drawings that restore dignity to people, but at the same time the tombstones tell the drama of those who die without an identity. On the tombs, the sea is often drawn wrapped in barbed wire, like in a prison. Over the years the Forum has managed to reconstruct fragments of stories, a form of respect towards these victims of the sea. One grave is for a man the group have named 'Yassin' from Eritera. "We don't actually know what his name was. Yassin arrived dead in Lampedusa, but we wrote Yassin because a shipwrecked survivor said that someone near him was shouting this name” explains Giovanetti. Giovanetti tells the story of Ester Ada who died in 2009. “A Turkish merchant ship, the Pinar, rescued 153 migrants, including a dead woman. A dispute opens between Italy and Malta and despite being in Maltese waters, Malta refuses to welcome the merchant ship. The standoff lasts four days and in the end Italy welcomes the migrants together with the body of Ester Ada, this young woman who died during the crossing.”

Another young woman known as Welela is one of the very migrants buried in Lampedusa whose name and story we know says Giovanetti : “She was an Eritrean girl who was trying to reunite with her brother and during the journey she suffered a very serious accident that left her with burns all over her body.” “Once she arrived on the island (dead) she was taken to the mortuary and a lady from Lampedusa temporarily donated her tomb, so we were able to bury her here. Trying to reconstruct the history and identity of this person, our research intersected with that of her brother who lives in a city in Northern Europe and it was he who told us the whole story of this unfortunate girl,” he adds.

A few kilometres from the cemetery, on the Favaloro pier, patrol boats continue to disembark people rescued at sea. On April 21, 85 people were rescued by the coast guard in the stormy sea, along with the body of a young man, according to the Italian Red Cross. The latest confirmed victim of over 30,000 deaths in the Mediterranean in the last ten years, according to the International Organization for Migration.

Imad Dalil runs the migrants hotspot in Lampedusa for the Italian Red Cross. He says: “We are here to welcome people, alive as you said, inside the hotspot and guarantee them, with the multidisciplinary team, all the services both material and health and psychiatric support. Also dead people arrive at the dock and we are here for them too.”

Valeria Passeri, an aid worker for Mediterranean Hope, a refugee and migrant programme of the Federation of Protestant Churches in Italy says Lampedusa is a place where migrants pass through, but those who die enroute remain and the cemetery is a place where they can be remembered and belong. “The cemetery is a very important place because today it is the place where the people of Lampedusa and the people on the move meet. The only place where they are together. It is a place where it is possible to remember and taking care of that space means dedicating attention, honouring and welcoming people even if they did not make it.”