From the summer of 2015, as Europe faced what the media termed at first the ‘migration’ and later the ‘refugee crisis’, a cemetery of unknown persons in south-eastern Tunisia started gaining in fame. Journalists, researchers, documentary film makers, photographers, and activists began travelling to the coastal town of Zarzis specifically to report on a makeshift cemetery for the victims of the European Union’s border. These foreigners were welcomed by local Red Crescent volunteers, and in particular by Chamseddine, an unemployed ex-fisherman who over the years became deeply involved in the burial of unknown persons. Aiming to improve the state of the cemetery, he facilitated their access to the terrain and provided them with his own narrative of what had been and was still unfolding in the Mediterranean, and who in his view was to take responsibility for these deaths. The story of Chamseddine particularly captured the attention of European journalists, who almost unanimously focused on his personal engagement to tell the story of the cemetery. Told through one man’s charitable commitment to provide dignity to those who died at the EU’s liquid border, the cemetery was framed as a place epitomising both the deadly effects of migration policies in Europe, and the compassion of simple citizens in the face of its horror. By the summer of 2017, the cemetery and its self-appointed guardian Chamseddine became the headline story coming out of Tunisia aimed at European audiences. It is also through relations with Chamseddine that different local and international actors started organising to materially fix the cemetery, by launching crowdfunding campaigns and by travelling to Zarzis to plant trees, donate body bags, and clear the land of rubbish. Based on two years ethnographic fieldwork research in Zarzis (2015-2017), this paper will explore the conceptual and practical acts of ‘fixing’ that arose from Chamseddine’s interactions with a variety of visitors at the cemetery. These acts resulted in this ad hoc cemetery becoming a focal symbol triggering a vast array of moral and political discourses of empathy and hope, but also of blame and responsibility allocation, bringing to the fore the colonial and neo-colonial legacies of the so called ‘migration/refugee crisis’.