Vathy, Euboea

Children living in a center for refugees and asylum seekers performed at the Athens Conservatoire on Friday, under the direction of Dee Isaacs, professor of music at the University of Edinburgh.

The children, who reside at the in Ritsona camp, north of Athens, were accompanied by the Cellos for Change band.

Insecurity, poor infrastructure and isolation are taking a toll on the will to learn of youngsters at refugee camps, according to educators. 

Authorities in the Evia town of Halkida are investigating the attempted gang rape of an 11-year-old resident of a migrant and refugee camp in Ritsona, northeast of the capital.

The death of a 27-year-old Afghan asylum seeker at the Ritsona migrant camp on Evia has sparked fresh protestations over the absence of a Muslim cemetery in Greece except for Thrace, leading to bodies being left in mortuaries for lack of a viable alternative.

A second migrant facility in Greece has entered quarantine after a resident tested positive for coronavirus.

It comes three days after a similar facility, where 23 asylum seekers were found to be infected, was put under quarantine.

In the latest case, a 53-year-old Afghan man staying at Malakasa camp along with hundreds of other people was confirmed to have the virus.

Greek Health Ministry spokesman Sotiris Tsiodras on Thursday announced 99 new cases of coronavirus with the death toll rising to 53. 

Of these 23 are residents at the Ritsona refugee camp, north of Athens, and 49 people on a passenger ferry currently anchored off Piraeus. 

Deaths rose to 53 after three more patients, died in the hospital, he said.

A new mother from a refugee camp in Ritsona, northeast of the Greek capital, tested positive for the novel coronavirus, the Migration Ministry said on Tuesday.

The woman was tested after being taken to an Athens hospital to give birth on Sunday. Her baby and its father have also been tested and were found to be free of the virus.

The opening on Thursday of Greece's first crematorium in Ritsona on the island of Evia serves as an example of the sometimes backward state of the country. 

In Greece, a funerary custom which is anything but a novelty for most European countries became tangled up in a web of dogmatic beliefs that held it hostage to political reluctance for decades. 

The discovery on Thursday by police of new warehouses containing raw materials for the production of contraband cigarettes in Ritsona, central Greece, and Aspropyrgos, southwest Attica, dealt another blow to a major tobacco smuggling racket in the country, according to authorities.

A Syrian woman stands inside her new kitchen in a container at the refugee camp of Ritsona, north of Athens, Tuesday. New container houses arrived for 160 refugee families with children in Ritsona camp while over than 60.000 refugees and migrants are stuck in Greece. [EPA]