In February 2012, about one hundred asylum seekers formed a roughly fifty-metre line near Athens' Aliens Police Directorate. The office admitted only twenty people at 6 a.m. each Saturday. People waited through a winter night on a street marked by mud and rubbish, using blankets, newspapers or pieces of cloth against the cold.
A weekly bottleneck turned access to protection into a queue before the legal process had even begun. Its length did not measure the merits of the claims; it displayed the distance between the number seeking an appointment and the number the system allowed through.