Abstrakt
Between August 2015 and the present, thousands of people appeared in the Balkans as a rather specific type of travellers - in the role of volunteers who provide indispensable humanitarian aid to the refugees along the "Balkan route." This contribution pursues the aim of presenting a basic overview of how the volunteer movement appeared, how it works and how it still influences the functioning of the whole Balkan route on the one hand. Using an anthropologic approach, it also thinks of the specific situation that is constituted by the encounter of refugees and volunteers for both groups on the other.
The volunteers are coming to the Balkans with a preconceived idea of the "fleeing people in distress" that often does not correspond with the reality and their perception of this encounter then influences, e.g., the media picture of the events along the Balkan route in the Czech Republic. As a result, the contribution tries to analyse where and why the ideas of the individual actors (do not) meet and to answer the perpetual question: who is the good guy and who is the bad guy here?