Balkans, Anatolia, Caucasus, Levant and other Middle East, Iran, Afghanistan, South Asia, occasional forays into southern Italy, Spain or eastern Europe, minorities, the nation-state and nationalism — and whatever other quirks or obsessions lurk inside my head.
“A June 2013 Gallup poll revealed that 70% of Americans hate their jobs or have “checked out” of them. Life may or may not suck any more than it did a generation ago, but our belief in “progress” has increased expectations that life should be more satisfying, resulting in mass disappointment. For many of us, society has become increasingly alienating, isolating and insane, and earning a buck means more degrees, compliance, ass-kissing, shit-eating, and inauthenticity. So, we want to rebel. However, many of us feel hopeless about the possibility of either our own escape from societal oppression or that political activism can create societal change. So, many of us, especially young Americans, rebel by what is commonly called mental illness.”
and:
“The reality is that with enough helplessness, hopelessness, passivity, boredom, fear, isolation, and dehumanization, we rebel and refuse to comply. Some of us rebel by becoming inattentive. Others become aggressive. In large numbers we eat, drink and gamble too much. Still others become addicted to drugs, illicit and prescription. Millions work slavishly at dissatisfying jobs, become depressed and passive aggressive, while no small number of us can’t cut it and become homeless and appear crazy. Feeling misunderstood and uncared about, millions of us ultimately rebel against societal demands, however, given our wherewithal, our rebellions are often passive and disorganized, and routinely futile and self-destructive.”
And, finally, the nail-it quote from writer and all-around Renaissance man, Lewis Mumford, written in 1951:
“The most deadly criticism one could make of modern civilization is that apart from its man-made crises and catastrophes, is not humanly interesting. . . . In the end, such a civilization can produce only a mass man: incapable of spontaneous, self-directed activities: at best patient, docile, disciplined to monotonous work to an almost pathetic degree. . . . Ultimately such a society produces only two groups of men: the conditioners and the conditioned, the active and passive barbarians.” —Lewis Mumford, 1951
Yes, of course, the maps I posted here, in “The Invasion of America” and have reposted above, unleashed a torrent of nationalist, hysterical emails and comments from Greeks — and only Greeks — that I have to address.
Yes, the maps are clearly inaccurate in certain respects, particularly with the territory indicated as inhabited primarily by Albanians. That an Albanian majority lived, or that Albanian was spoken in such a solid block, as far south as the Ambrakikos Gulf (down to Preveza) in the first map, and clear down to the Gulf of Corinth on the second map, is ridiculous and is probably the result of dumb speculation on the map-makers’ part and not motivated by some nationalist agenda. And yet, let’s not forget those periods in history when Greek Epiros was much more Albanian than it is today. Until the early nineteenth century, the region of Souli, right behind these mountains (below) seen from my mother’s village Pesta in south-central Epiros and just north of the border with the prefecture (I guess?) of Preveza, was inhabited largely by Albanian-speaking Christians, when they were expelled and dispersed by Ali Paşa. Just north, lowland parts along the coast of what’s now Thesprotia around the coastal city of Igoumenitsa (see map below) were primarily inhabited by Albanian Muslims (known as Çamedes and the region as Çamëria) until they were massacred and expelled by Greek Nationalist resistance forces during WWII. And, to jump back in time, one of the splinter states that emerged from the complicated history of the Despotate of Epiros, was ruled by Albanian clans with their capital in Artaand did extend as far south as Naupaktos and the Gulf of Corinth. Oddly enough, the second map, which ridiculously shows all of Aetolo-Acharnania as Albanian, fails to indicate the large Albanian-speaking regions of the Peloponnese.
(click)
Epiros
But the second of the two maps at top is also ridiculous in that the Aegean coast of Anatolia was never so solidly Greek so deeply inland. Greeks were not a majority anywhere in the region (as Metaxas pointed out in his warning to the egomaniacal Venizelos just before he embarked on his insane campaign), and if the region had been so Greek, there wouldn’t have been any Turkish villages for the Greek army to commit its atrocities against soon after landing in Smyrna in 1919.
Of course, no Greek readers complained about that.
I found the fact thatDobruja, the Danube delta region of what’s now northeastern Bulgaria, was so solidly Muslim to be interesting — again, if the map is accurate.
Finally, what both maps do make abundantly clear, and should be abundantly true to anyone with any kind of historical integrity, is that the majority ethnic group in what’s now Greek Macedonia were once Bulgaro-Macedonians. (I’ve been told to go fuck myself by numerous Greeks whenever I say this. And in those exact words. And in the middle of perfectly civil conversations. That’s the degree of infantile, paranoid anger Neo-Greeks feel about the issue. And it’s totally obvious that that comes from semi-consciously knowing that Macedonia’s Greekness is problematic and much more historically complicated and heterogeneous than they would like it to be.) Obviously that’s not the case today, due to their expulsion throughout the decade of the 1910s and the Balkan and Second World Wars, a population exchange with post-war Bulgaria, the massive influx of Greeks from Turkey in the ’20s, and that the fact that those Macedonian-speakers who remained and still form a most cohesive ethnic block in the northwest corner provinces of Kostur and Lerin, (see map below) are still too terrorized to speak their identity out loud, or, even more tragically, have been so brainwashed that if you even suggest that they speak some form of Bulgaro-Macedonian, they become enraged. More Royalist than the King. More on Macedonia in future posts. But let’s just say that the one thing the maps show definitively is that, of all the countries to come out of the collapse of Ottoman power in the Balkans — and given the real demographics on the ground — it’s safe to say that Bulgaria came out the most short-changed and screwed.
Two maps below: one showing the regions of Kostur (Kastoria) and Lerin (Florina) in the northwest corner of Greek Macedonia. And beneath, a map of the same regions where you can see the fake new names given to many towns and villages in the region to replace the old Slavic ones. This did not just happen in Macedonia, but throughout Greece. But since Macedonia was the least Greek region of twentieth-century Greece, it was imperative that this Hellenization process and obscene distortion of history be applied there most widely. The thing is that the names of these villages are so patently fake-sounding and made up — Cold Spring, Two Rivers, Deer Hill, etc. — that they sound like American suburban developments. Most were just completely fabricated…a village next to my mother’s called by the not particularly lyrical — yet not particularly or dangerously Slavic-sounding — name of Moulies was changed to Perdika — Partridge. No reason. Or, they were excavated classical names based on ancient Macedonian personages, like Amyntaio, previously Sorović, or Ptolemaida, formerly Kaylar, and inhabited exclusively by Greek-speaking Turks and Yörük-type nomads settled there from Anatolia, who had preserved their nomadic lifestyle and pure Turko-Asiatic physical characteristics until the twentieth century. Then there’s the stunningly pretentious Argos Orestikon,* whose historic name was Hrupišta. (All these can be found on the bottom map.) Or the renaming took its cue from the slightest possibility that in Classical times a settlement by that name may have existed within a hundred-kilometer radius of the present-day town — i.e. Vodena changed “back,” supposedly, to Edessa. On top of it all, most of the real Slavic names were so much more beautiful and appropriate: Vodena or Voden (Edessa) is a pleasant little city full of babbling brooks and waterfalls and comes, precisely, from the Slavic word for water, “voda,” while the new name for the beautiful village of Neveska, shown in the second map, is simply a translation from the Slavic — Nymphaio — and means the same thing: “bridal.” Don’t know why the village would’ve been called that.
Finally, these paranoid, nationalist name changes happened throughout the Balkans and Turkey, so you can’t just criticize the Greek state for it.
* Don’t ask me what this ugly little town near Kastoria has to do with Argos in the Peloponesse, or with Orestes, the mythological scion of the cursed Atreid family, who, almost Christ-like, took his family’s curse upon him and eventually was absolved of it. If any one has any clue, please let me know.
She’s the daughter of an East German Communist apparatckik Lutheran pastor. I’m sorry, but that’s all I need to know… How much more of a moralizing and, at the same time, morally compromised, background can someone possibly be from.
I don’t know if readers get the full connotation of the word “apparatchik.” But it means a member of a Communist party in former Eastern Europe that enjoyed the kind of privileges that more than anything made the supposed egalitarianism of the “existing socialism” of Communist Europe a heinous lie and an ugly joke. It meant living well — comfortable housing, summer houses, trips abroad — as millions suffered…terribly. And to have been a cleric in that structure that enjoyed official favor, you had to have been the worst kind of collaborator and informant for a horrendous system of terror. And Protestant on top of it…
And the future of much of humanity rests in her hands.
Don’t look to me for economic analyses. I think I had had my first credit card in college for a while, before I realized that the amount you paid back to them was more than what you bought with them. That means credit and debt – the foundations of Western Civilization – were things I didn’t understand until like my mid-twenties. So as far as economics are concerned, I generally listen as carefully as I can to those who seem remotely intelligent to me and weigh what I can gather.
Greece is shaking up the Eurozone again, because parliament couldn’t vote for a President, I believe, and parliament was dissolved and now we’re having elections on January 25th. And everyone, or many people, are trembling at the thought of a SYRIZA, the left-of-center party, victory. I don’t know why they chose to call themselves by an acronym that means “The Coalition of the Radical Left.” Paranoiacs who talk about them as if they were Bolsheviks are already crazed enough in their attacks on the party, and SYRIZA really is, just that, a left-of-center-party. They only seem radical because the “center” – in Greece and everywhere – has moved so far to the right in every sense for the past few decades.
People in Greece whose intellects I respect think that a SYRIZA government – since they are in the lead in polls – would be a disaster: they think the best route for getting Greece out of its economic stagnation is to continue to follow the austerity dictates of the so-called “Troika” — the European Commission (EC), the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the European Central Bank (ECB) – though Greece has followed them pretty much to the letter and steadily for the past two years, and there are more rounds of austerity coming, and little has improved. And if I ask them the more theoretical question of why Greeks should keep voting for the PASOK/ND two-party clique whose politicians have run the show since 1974 and are a bunch of almost Putinesque cronies in their brazen, shameless corruption and who got the country in the mess it’s in in the first place, they really don’t have an answer for me. One says he just doesn’t vote at all. But how fast a way is that for turning Greece into an American kind of politics-less civil society – which should be an oxymoron.
But I have reason to think that some of the people I listen to in Greece are listening to their class interests – worse, their class instincts, in the most knee-jerk sense – so I also try to listen to Americans I respect: like and especially Paul Krugman. I’ve cited him on this blog often, especially in reference to France – a country which I care about deeply – and he’s a vociferous critic of the EU’s austerity policies towards its prodigal southern and Celtic brothers. He points out that the economy of France, to speak about the center for a moment and not the perhaps hopeless periphery, and how much better it’s doing on every indicator than even Britain itself, precisely for sticking to some of its old-fashioned, socialized (not “socialist”) ideology. And to how much better the United States is doing, because, fairly or not, it sent a fresh flush of cash into its finance industry (instead of setting up a guillotine on Wall and Broad, which would’ve been my instinct) and now is probably the first major economy to have more or less dragged itself out of the hole. He’s written e-n-d-l-e-s-s-l-y about how the Great American Depression was on the verge of ending in 1936, when the government decided to “tighten belts” again and plunged the country back into the deepest economic slump ever in 1937, until it changed policies and then WWII spending ultimately saved it. And he sees the lag in Europe’s recovery, include the euro’s precipitous plunge to near one-to-one parity with the dollar, as the result — and purely — of moralizing and moralist, German-guided, insistence on austerity.
But as far as Greece goes, all the fear-mongers have brought out their heavy artillery. Maybe because I am such an economic illiterate, I recognize the psychological poker game involved in economics so much more clearly than others may. It’s amazing how the “Masters of the Universe” – these Alpha-Male studs that run our world in ways we’re too stupid to understand, because as it turns out, they don’t really understand them either – suddenly become menacing thugs or henny-penny pussies, alternating between the two, as soon as the width of their profit margins is even slightly threatened. This may be more an American problem than a European one, but I think it is what’s going on with Greece, the prospects of a SYRIZA victory and the discourse it’s generated. “Disaster” will follow. “Germans are ready to let Greece leave the Eurozone.” Frau Merkel dusts off her Lutheran-Communist pastor daddy’s sermons, and like the Biskop in Bergman’s “Fanny and Alexander,” threatens fire and brimstone if Greece does not “koopereit.” “You must pay us,” say the lenders, “or it will be a disaster for all of us.” “We can’t…and won’t” say the borrowers, “and actually it will only be a disaster for you. You’ve already pushed us into a corner where we don’t have anything to lose, so…what are you going to do about that? Send us to debtors prison?” Hmmm…? Then what?
I’ve called the European Union “a neo-colonialist body disguised as the Highest Form of Western Humanism Project” before. And I can’t speak for Spain or Portugal or Ireland. But what I see the Union doing in Greece is engaging in the systematic destruction of a small economy.* By “small economy” I don’t mean a small territory of ten million with limited resources and a small-scale GDP. It’s a given that that’s what Greece always was. What I mean is a society of small-scale, personal, economic units. Some may balk at this idea, but I’m talking about something that’s one of the most positive aspects of our Ottoman inheritance. Late Byzantium was moving toward a system of large-scale landowners with an increasingly enserfed population – whether it was an organic development or the influence of Frankish feudalism is a big question. The fact, though, is that this process was arrested by Ottoman systems of land tenure and the block those systems put on the development of a landed, inherited aristocracy. And then in the twentieth century, Greece was the only former Ottoman country lucky enough to not have that small-scale type economy disrupted and perverted by the experiments of communism or even the economically statist policies that came to dominate Republican Turkey itself.
Why am I going so far back in history to talk about Greek elections in 2015? Because you might have to look that far back to see why we were spared the experiences of a large landless peasantry that could then be turned into a disenfranchised industrial proletariat – to a great extent at least; yes, there was Thessaly and there was Laurio, but nothing like what Western Europe or Russia experienced. The Greek entered modernity armed with few advantages, but one was a widespread public education system of fairly high standard for a country of its resources, the roots of which were already well-established in Ottoman times and put into systematic place almost immediately after independence. And the other was that, generally, he did so as an economically independent entity. A small-scale free peasant. A middle-class owner of some property. A “nation of shopkeepers,” as Napoleon condescendingly (and inaccurately) said of Britain. And all the better for it. Not even the sweeping flood of refugees from the Population Exchange of the 1920s with Turkey, which involved the absorption of an almost 30% increase in our population in less than five years; not even the tragic depopulation of rural Greece in the 1950s — for all its economic and military reasons — and the hideous Athens it created; neither of those massive sociological transformations changed the average Greek citizen from what he was: a free and reasonably independent economic agent of his own destiny.
THIS is what the “memoranda” are trying, and will succeed if allowed — if they already haven’t actually — in destroying. The tax on home-ownership and personal real estate is what I consider the most heinous and symbolic, even if it’s not the issue most Greeks are likely to get rabid about. Don’t ask me how: maybe the beauty of Athens had to be sacrificed to the πολυκατοικία, the apartment houses that I’ve called “cement-caves” where most Athenians and other Greek city-dwellers live, to create the domestic structure of Neo-Greek society. But what did emerge from the process of post-war Greek urbanization was a country where most people owned their own homes, and where – to a certain extent – a vertical version of traditional society was maintained. Relatives lived near each other, often in the same building, and though during the heady credit-backed lifestyle of the nineties it was common among Neo-Greeks to mock themselves for such domestic arrangements – grandma, or worse, your in-laws, living upstairs, and thirty-something-year-old kids living with their parents – I can’t tell you how many people I’ve seen having come to rely on precisely those networks to survive the present crisis…and actually did back then even, before things got bad, as well: a mother-in-law that will take care of the children while mom’s working and have lunch ready by mid-afternoon for the family to share together; a sister-in-law with whom you can move in for an indeterminate amount of time till you’ve found a job again; networks that extend back to one’s ancestral village, where some lone, remnant relative has some olive trees for oil or some animals for cheese or just a bostani that can provide you with some tomatoes or cucumbers or some apricots that provide you with some jam. I remarked to others on how more civil and warm people in the public sphere seemed to be towards each other the last time I was in Greece, on what a, perhaps silent, but palpable, sense of greater solidarity people seemed to feel for one another and I got a dose of that almost instinctive Greek cynicism from most: “You’re romanticizing”… “Yeah, try going downtown during the midday rush…” But I also was witness, in a very memorable conversation, to one of those cynics getting dressed down by someone else: “Μη το λες…μερικοί έχουν βρει το φιλότιμό τους…” “Don’t say that so easily. A lot of people have found their sense of honor again.”
“Honor” is a bad translation for “φιλότιμo,” which means honor and amour propre and sense of dignity and reciprocity, all in one complex structure of emotions and social acts. Basically, “philotimo” is the sense of self-respect that’s intimately tied up with the upholding of your obligations to others that held Greeks together for centuries. All readers here know I’m a fanatic opponent of reading Classicizing virtues – or Classical anything — into Neo-Greek society, but the importance of “philotimo,” I feel, even if just discursive, even if only in its lapses, is a millennia-long constant.
The reader may be excused in thinking I’ve strayed from a basic issue of economics to an excavation of Greek cultural morals. And the truth is that I’m feeling kind of challenged right now in tying together the threads of where I’ve ended up with those I started with.
Well, here then: it’s those patterns of economic independence and the traditional bonds of morality that supported them that the Troika is determined to destroy. The Greek civil sector was not particularly bloated, not even compared with France, for example, which is my prime model for a life well-lived. And if it employed more people than it actually needed, let’s stop talking, like some are, as if it were a civil sector along Soviet lines: “They pretend to pay us and we pretend to work.”The Greek worker actually worked more hours than anyone in any industrialized country but South Korea – South Korea. Not efficient? Efficient for what and to what purpose? For the surpluses the Greek or other governments should enjoy? Since when is the state a business that has to pull in big profit margins and not primarily a structure for meeting the needs of its citizens? The same for the cutting of pensions that allowed older people to live in dignity and even help younger members of the family and have now been slashed by the Troika dictates? Really? Why? For whom?
And then on top of it all to tax people’s homes… We’re used to it in the United States, but I can’t convey what a sense of shock, and rightly so, this caused among Greeks – and even me. You’re going to tax me on the one roof I have over my head, the one thing I’m sure of, the one thing that I can grab at for some form of security, even if it’s Karagözi’s corrugated tin çandiri?
Alexis Tsipras
But let better minds than mine explain. This is an interview that Costas Lapavitsas recently gave a rather lame and argument-less Stephen John Sackur on the BBC’s Hardtalk. Lapavitsas is an economist, a graduate of the London School of Economics, a professor at the University of London and a columnist for The Guardian. He has the kind of intellectual confidence, articulateness and steel-trap mind that is — not just super-sexy — but is the gift of a certain kind of Greek who makes me immensely proud. He’s an advisor for SYRIZA and I’m sure he’s detested by the party’s opponents because they can’t dismiss him as a childish, bratty demagogue the way they can dismiss Alexis Tsipras (above), the party’s actual leader, about whom I, too, have mixed feelings. There’s the BBC interview and then if you have the patience there are another interview and two longer lectures of his that get into stuff much more deeply.
He’s compelling…and smart…and not afraid of the truth. He makes the argument for what was always the small-scale of Greek economics: that it was never a country that lived off of large-scale foreign investment, that like I stated above, it never had a large “alienated proletariat” waiting for foreign industries to come and employ – exploit — which is precisely what the European Union wants to do to all of its southern periphery. He’s realistic; he was for exiting the Eurozone back in 2011-12, but admits it’s unfeasible now. He calmly listens to interviewer Sackur pose the smuggest kind of conventional wisdom, “but, surely…” questions, and without skipping a beat, says: “No..” and proceeds to demolish him. (His response to Sackur’s attempt to use Ireland as an example in his argument is not only point-on, but historically poignant, personally moving to me as a Queens boy, and a really satisfying little slap in the Brit’s face.**) He sees his Greece as the humanitarian disaster it has become, with a GDP that has fallen 25%, 50% youth unemployment and 25% overall unemployment, skyrocketing suicide rates and other rates of psychological diseases such as acute depression. He says that it has moved beyond melt-down into what he calls “permafrost” and a stone from which no more blood can be drawn.*** He sees high, macroeconomic finance for the poker game it is: like I said – again – a game in which those who hold the reins of power alternately disseminate panic or fear in an intentionally self-fulfilling prophecy; and that those people are bullies, who will probably back down from their demands if a critical mass refuses to be bullied by them.
The point is building that critical mass. And I thought I could vote in Greek elections for the first time this Sunday, but there are no consular elections for ex-pats possible with Greece as there is for a multitude of other countries — typical… But if I could vote, I know who I’d be voting for.
* Tangentially but, I think, not in the least irrelevant to this post… One of the starkest lessons in geopolitics and political economy I was ever taught was when I started teaching English as a Second Language in New York’s CUNY system and realized that my Latin American students weren’t destitute, landless peasants from the Guatemalan highlands or Caracas slum-dwellers. They were well-educated teachers, accountants, civil servants, small business owners… They were part of a sizeable but fragile urban middle-class that the Neo-Liberalism applied to many South American economies in the ’80s trapped in a vice, and forced out into emigration. And that’s what’s happening in countries like Greece and Spain and Ireland today.
** Meaning, that given the history of the British in Ireland, it’s a bit rich for an Englishman to be using that country as an example of “recovery.” Yeah, Ireland is doing better. Better because the tragic full-scale emigration of its youth has started again — something you can’t miss all around you in New York and especially in Queens — the continuation of a demographic catastrophe which first started when Great Britain practically depopulated the island by ripping apart the fabric of the Irish economy, its people and its civilization in the nineteenth century, with policies based on a moralizing, racist, Protestant set of arguments that are remarkably similar to those that Frau Merkel likes to spout about the European South today. And Lapavitsas makes that abundantly clear to him. Plus Sackur’s whole fussy, donnish demeanor and Oxbridge accent make him so the perfect dude to cast if you need a target Englishman that you almost feel sorry for him; if I were him I’d need a drink after that interview. See my: “The Graves Are Walking”: Was the Great Potato Famine a genocide?”
And when I say “Protestant” in contexts like this, you can be sure — as per Weber — that I mean capitalist, for which most mainstream White Protestantism and its moral codes — again, as per Weber (maybe a bit exaggerated) — is simply a front.
This amazing footage… At a 2009 Haris Alexiou concert at the Roman Odeion of Herodes Atticus , a Greek GI jumps on stage to dance to the “Zebekiko Tes Eudokias,” a legendary Manos Loizos composition from a film, I think, of the same name. I don’t even know where to start with this piece. I’m posting it now and maybe will come back to it later. He’s gorgeous and a beautiful dancer and his brazen confidence and impulsiveness are deeply Greek — and she too, of course, is extraordinarily impressive woman. And the gender semiotics of the scene are sort of unfathomable really and should just be watched. The zebekiko, of course (see video in previous post: “The last bouzoukia in Astoria” — a video by yours truly), is never a couple dance; it’s quintessentially solipsistic and all about a particularly male loneliness, yet at first there’s an extended moment when he, a soldier — and one of Alexiou’s classic numbers, by Loizos also and lyrics by Manoles Rasoules (which I wouldn’t have imagined) is about a lonely soldier — actually dances itto her… In homage practically, and she, Haris Alexiou, being the reigning Queen Mother and Earth Goddess of Greek popular music for some forty years now…the whole thing is just…I dunno… Just, just watch it.
Because, of course, then, she does pull back and leaves him to his solitude.
One of the most harrowing numbers from 2009’s No One Knows About Persian Cats by Bahman Ghobadi, a film that I’m pretty amazed I haven’t gotten around to posting about till now. I don’t even know if the song is in Farsi or Pashto, because the dancers look like Pashtuns doing some like, but not quite, an Attan, but it’s gorgeous — and the lyrics could easily be that of a zebekiko: “I want to climb the highest peak, and drink red wine…but someone is up there waiting to imprison me…”
I like this “Qalandar” number, but what really hooked me on these guys was a piece called “Jogiya,” which unfortunately is not on YouTube and the BBC won’t let us have, so you’ll have to watch it at their site: Asia Beats: Adi and Suhail. The ghazal-thumri-like delicacy and eroticism, the qawwali intensity and the keyboard all in one funky mess really blew me away. And what’s up with that gorgeous black-on-black sherwani on Suhail in the “Jogiya” video.
Russian feminist rockers fight system holding 700,000 – the world’s largest per capita prison population after the US.
Moscow, Russia – After spending almost two years in jail for performing their “punk prayer” against Russian President Vladimir Putin at Moscow’s main Orthodox cathedral in 2012, two young women from the feminist protest band Pussy Riot chose not to go on a world tour or settle somewhere in the West to escape further persecution.
They just keep putting out amazing stuff — and, tamam, even when it’s not amazing, it’s stuff no one else does… Cool article on the legendary Athenian neighborhood, my first choice if I had to live there.
“This is a theatre where all the ills and blessings of modern Greece become painfully obvious and clash. In this sense, Exarchia will either become a paradigm of resistance and revival through solidarity and unity, or a symbol of anger, violence and the disintegration of the social fabric in crisis-stricken Greece.”
Exarchia: A space for urban resistance
Yiannis Baboulias
Last updated: 23 December 2014
Athens’ Exarchia neighbourhood has preserved the memory of decades of resistance to state repression.
There are few places in Europe where you can find riot police squads in full gear, permanently stationed around buzzing cafes and restaurants. In all honesty, I know just one: Exarchia, the boho, ever-rebellious neighbourhood of Athens.
Situated in the centre of the city, right next to the “historic triangle” of Syntagma parliament building, Monastiraki (under the Acropolis) and Omonoia Square, Exarchia is considerably unpolished compared to its neighbours to the south and east. But what it lacks in clean sidewalks, it makes up for in virility and spirit.
This is a neighbourhood of politics, resistance and communal spirit. The first recorded student riot took place here more than a century ago. It was here that students started occupying universities protesting the 1967 dictatorship, and it was here that on November 17, 1973, a tank sent by the military junta to evict the occupation, broke down the gates of the Polytechnic University, crushing students. This was where the military regime signed its own death warrant.
After the restoration of democracy in 1974, Exarchia became home to the emerging left-wing movements, anarchist collectives, intellectuals, activists and, notoriously, urban guerrilla terrorist groups like “November 17”, which came straight out of the Exarchia far-left.
Today Exarchia has come to represent a microcosm of the major conflicts within Greek society: the police vs the politicised youth; the old vs the young generation; the state vs the poor and the marginalised; the political elite vs the austerity-stricken population.
The memory of violence
The streets of the neighbourhood have preserved a long history of police violence. The streets and the people of Exarchia remember. It is a neighbourhood tradition to commemorate resistance and protest against political violence, which inevitably pits it against the state and its repressive apparatus.
In November 1985, during the commemoration of the November 1973 student uprising, 15-year-old Michalis Kaltezas was shot by riot police. The Polytechnic was occupied once again by angry youth denouncing police violence.
In 2008, 15-year-old Alexandros Grigoropoulos was also shot dead by a policeman in Exarchia. The neighbourhood exploded into weeks-long riots. The incident took place in Messologiou Street, where young people still hang out, sipping beer, next to the mural set up in memory of young Alexandros.
This year’s commemoration of his death on December 6 turned into clashes with the police. Yet again, the police forces brutally attacked the relatively peaceful demonstration running through downtown Athens, and yet again, Exarchia became the stage of a well-known war game between the angry youth and the police.
The way protests happen in Exarchia, however, is a bit different. The streets, the buildings, the residents are not just passive spectators of this extended war. In December, the whole neighbourhood was “up in arms” throwing flowerpots and furniture from their balconies at the riot police; Molotov cocktails were raining down on the police from rooftops.
Exarchia remembers, and the police does little to help it forget. Police brutality scars the neighbourhood on a regular basis. On November 17, when the demonstration for the anniversary of the Polytechnic uprising ended, mounted units took to the streets of Exarchia, breaking down building entrances, intimidating people on the sidewalks, damaging private property and beating up journalists. The next day there was just one phrase in the minds of many of the people I spoke to in the neighbourhood: collective punishment.
Every year Exarchia adds to its log of murder, violence and police brutality and its memory does not fail.
A political stance
Exarchia, in the mainstream narrative, has seemingly turned into what the police had always maintained it is: A stronghold of dangerous anarchists. But the roots of this hostility go deeper than a mere grudge against the police.
It should not come as a surprise that the headquarters of the PASOK party, situated in the neighbourhood, is heavily guarded by the police. The 2009 PASOK government was instrumental in passing the EU-dictated austerity measures that have driven 2.3 million Greeks into poverty, another 3.8 million under threat of poverty, destroyed social services provisions across Greece and sent millions into the streets unemployed.
Police in full gear stand guard all year round in front of the PASOK HQ. Exarchia residents have repeatedly complained about their presence. In the summer, after the residents of a neighbouring building got into a dispute with the officers over the noise police buses were making, the officers threatened to break into the building and arrest them. In protest, thousands of residents walked out into the streets under the slogan “Out with the police!”
The neighbourhood also showed solidarity with the hunger strike of Nikos Romanos, Grigoropoulos’ best friend, who is now in prison. Tension quickly escalated and on December 3, a group of anarchists attacked the PASOK headquarters with 30 molotov bombs. As the police chased them down Messologiou Street, a group took refuge in the bar where I was sitting. They took off their masks and sat around pretending they were customers. They seemed angry, high on adrenaline and I could tell by their faces that the feud with the police and the state will not be settled any time soon.
A unique community spirit
In the corner of Navarinou and Zoodochou Pigis street, a tiny park breaks the grey urban mass that is Exarchia. This once empty lot was meant to be turned into a parking lot, but activists took it over and after years of bitter struggle, managed to bring it under communal control and turned it into a green oasis, with a playground and a garden. “Their parking, our park” is the slogan of the group that runs it, and it’s the perfect metaphor for what the lively neighbourhood wants to be.
Co-ops and social enterprises are multiplying in Exarchia. In the rest of Athens one might see empty cafes and vacant shops, but in Exarchia, the streets are littered with alternative businesses, like independent bookshops, co-op cafes and restaurants and even entire theatres.
The residents have also organised to drive the drug trade away from the central Exarchia square and its surrounding alleys, and have managed to do so to an impressive degree compared to a few years ago. What seemed like a plague that would drive the area to the ground, has improved, thanks to a very active neighbourhood association, which over the years has become an integral part of life here.
Exarchia is resisting through a civic spirit emboldened by the crisis, and with solidarity that extends well beyond its residents. This cradle of alternative lifestyles is also one of the most welcoming areas in Athens, where immigrants can hang out feeling safer than in most other areas.
For thousands of young Greeks, Exarchia has become a space for urban resistance. This is where they gather to talk and do politics. It is their arena for free expression, where they demonstrate the full extent of their anger with an indifferent, self-serving state that ignores their opinions and turns its back on their future.
This is a theatre where all the ills and blessings of modern Greece become painfully obvious and clash. In this sense, Exarchia will either become a paradigm of resistance and revival through solidarity and unity, or a symbol of anger, violence and the disintegration of the social fabric in crisis-stricken Greece.
Yiannis Baboulias is a journalist, writer and founding member of Precarious Europe, examining issues of precariousness, new nationalisms and independence movements across Europe. His work has been featured in Channel 4 News, Vice, the LRB and The Guardian among others.
Balkans, Anatolia, Caucasus, Levant and rest of ME, Iran, South Asia
Me, I'm Nicholas Bakos, a.k.a. "NikoBako." I'm Greek (Roman really, but when I say that in English some five people in the world today understand what I'm talking about, so I use "Greek" for shorthand). I'm from New York. I live all over the place these days. The rest should become obvious from the blog.
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