Exarchia and the Greek spirit of resistance

The neighborhood that played such a key role in the overthrow of Greece’s military dictatorship once again finds itself at the heart of a popular uprising.

Exarchia, Athens, July 14th 2011

I can’t believe my eyes. There they are, some twenty of them, in full riot gear, standing on the street corner. A menacing aura surrounds them as they conspicuously stare us down while we cross the street.

We are walking into Exarchia — the unofficial capital of anarchism in Greece, Europe, and perhaps the world. No policeman dares to venture in here, which is exactly why the government has decided to effectively cordon off the neighborhood, permanently deploying dozens of riot police on the edges of this modern Athenian “free state”. Only in the favelas of Rio and the townships around Jo’burg have I seen such urban roadblocks before.

As we walk through the gritty outskirts, I blurt out to Amalia that Exarchia must be one of the world’s prime loci of contestation. I just made up the term, but it sums it up pretty well. Everywhere you look, the walls are plastered with anarchist graffiti and protest posters calling for civic disobedience and popular insurrection. It’s kinda what I imagine the Quartier Latin or Berkeley to have been like back in 1968.

The police roadblocks mean that Exarchia is virtually under siege by the state’s security forces — and this is no surprise. Anarchists here are in a state of permanent revolution against the state. They regularly burn down the nearest police station, while the police themselves have often used excessive violence to crack down on the neighborhood’s “deviant” inhabitants.

We walk past a beautiful little park, situated in an open space between some semi-dilapidated flats. Scenically portrayed in front of the scrappy backdrop of revolutionary street art (“el pueblo unido!”), a group of pretty girls is sitting around chatting, while a junkie stumbles around tripping his nuts off. A Greek dude with dreads is playing with his dog on the bench right next to me.

Two or three years ago, the locals occupied this square in an attempt to block the municipality’s intentions to turn it into a car park. In that short time space of time, volunteers in the neighborhood spontaneously self-organized to transform the tarmacked quad into a small Utopian public space lined by trees, flowers, benches, an urban garden and even a children’s play ground.

“We fought so hard for this place,” Lydia would tell me later. “The police were really violent when we took it, but we held strong, and as you can see [it was 4am by that time] it remains occupied 24 hours a day just to prevent the police from coming in and destroying our public space.”

As she tells me this, the confuzzled junkie comes up to us begging for some spare change or a cigarette. I politely whisk him away, but Lydia briskly tells him to fuck off. “We fought so hard for this place,” she tells me again. “So much blood. So many tears. Now you understand why we try to keep it clear of the junkies. This place was made for people, not for drugs.”

After a beer, a smoke and some pictures, we get up and walk on. Two blocks away, a defunct squat now hosts a black commemorative plaque on its graffiti-infested walls. It bears the face of a good-looking young kid. His name was Alexandros Grigoropoulos. He died here on December 6th, 2008.

Alexandros was murdered by two policemen. The officers said he threw a stone or a bottle of water at their police car. Witnesses say he did nothing at all and was just walking by as the policemen got into an argument with a group of rebellious teenagers. Either way, he was only 15 years old when he died. Shot three times, in cold blood, by the forces of the state.

Alex’s murder unleashed a violent youth revolt of unprecedented proportions in Greece’s post-dictatorial history. Police stations and cars were torched with Molotov cocktails as outraged youths fought running street battles with the cops. “For four days straight, you just couldn’t enter the city center,” Amalia tells me. “The buses wouldn’t drive downtown, the shops remained closed, it was total chaos.”

The riots rapidly spread to the rest of Greece and abroad. Global solidarity protests were held in some 70 cities, as the murder quickly became a cause celèbre for anarchists and autonomists around the world. The 2008 youth revolt still remains a focal point for Greece’s anti-authoritarian Left, and is the main reason that riot police continue their protracted siege of the neighborhood.

But 2008 wasn’t the first time that the state’s security forces treated Exarchia’s rebellious citizens with such extreme violence. In 1973, the Polytechnic here was the theater to an initially peaceful student uprising against the country’s military dictatorship. While most of the students merely demanded a more democratic form of government, the junta immediately released its aggressive fury upon the young protesters.

A tank was sent in to crush the gates of the Polytechnic. As students fled the occupied university buildings, snipers took aim from the surrounding rooftops. They gunned down scores, killing at least 24, including a 5-year old boy caught in the crossfire. The real numbers, however, remain difficult to come by. Amalia tells me there must have been at least 40 dead. Hundreds were injured.

The Polytechnic uprising triggered a wave of popular dissent that eventually led to the collapse of the dictatorship in 1974. But despite (or perhaps because) of Exarchia’s key role in overthrowing the authoritarian regime, the state remained suspicious of the area’s politically-conscious population. Starting in 1989, riot police effectively occupied the neighborhood for three years, harassing locals and subjecting them to dictatorship-style “security” checks.

No wonder, then, that Greece’s youth has lost all trust in the police. No wonder A.C.A.B. tags are sprayed onto virtually every single wall in Exarchia, and chants of “cops, pigs, murderers” are omnipresent among the slogans being chanted by drunken and sober Greeks alike. No wonder, either, that the inhabitants of Exarchia, in particular, have developed a deep-seated hatred for the forces of “law and order.”

While the area is gradually being yuppified and is today considerably less edgy than it was back in the 1980s or 1990s, Exarchia still remains the hub of the Greek resistance movement. Many of the black bloc revolutionaries who so vehemently fought the riot police during the anti-austerity demonstrations of June 28-29 are rumored to live here. Still, it has to be noted that the preferred mode of contestation in Exarchia remains overwhelmingly peaceful.

Squats and cooperatives are ubiquitous, while bookshops, antique stores, organic food stalls, art expositions and open-air cinemas reveal the artistic, intellectual and socially-engaged nature of the neighborhood’s inhabitants. Some people here even use their own alternative currency, the Exarchia lira. Overall, it’s not violence that defines Exarchia — but defiance. Defiance of the state. Defiance of European and American imperialism. Defiance of global capital.

Many of the people who are now at Syntagma were once politicized as teenagers or students in Exarchia. In fact, many of the pretty faces I saw around in the streets, parks and squares of Exarchia I had previously seen at the popular assemblies in Syntagma.

The locus of contestation may have shifted downtown, but the people and the spirit that form the backbone of the Greek revolution are still largely the same. It’s just that they are no longer alone. In the past months, they have increasingly been joined in their struggle by a much broader cross-section of Greek society, including workers, pensioners, moderates and even men of the cloth.

As we leave the neighborhood and head back towards Syntagma, I walk past the checkpoint again and find myself looking straight into the eyes of a policeman. He’s a young dude, barely my age, but he looks nearly twice as big as thrice as dangerous in his full riot gear. Still, as his shallow eyes meet mine, I realize that I pity the fool. He’s just another guy. Put into a battle he will never win.