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Number Thirteen

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Austerity & Democracy in Athens

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Abstract

This chapter delves directly into Tsamadou Street, introducing us to the protagonists of the initiatives located in and around the Steki Metanaston. In their interviews, many activists share their experiences of urban anti-austerity mobilisations in Athens, such as the Syntagma Square movement and the “day of Marfin Bank”. Literally the “migrants’ hangout”, the Steki Metanaston currently hosts various collectives and groups. Among them is Piso Thrania (literally “the desks in the back row of the class”), a school of modern Greek for migrants that the author attended between 2012 and 2014. Accordingly, this central chapter also relates the joys and sorrows of ethnographic work (largely due to problems involving language) and the foremost issues that surfaced during the contact established with migrants (e.g., the escalation of xenophobic phenomena, the rise of Golden Dawn, the national politics of spatial exclusion during the crisis).

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Notes

  1. 1.

    An occupied and recovered factory in Thessaloniki. Controlled by the ceramics giant Filkeram-Johnson, it employed seventy people until 2009. Abandoned by the owners in May 2011, after repeated strikes due to delays in the payment of wages, the workers decided to self-manage the structure and self-recover its production, occupying the factory in shifts to ensure that the machinery was not taken away. For over two years they have produced biological detergents, receiving a salary of €359 per month and opening a dispute with the owner in order to manage the company through a cooperative (Vio.Me. 2013).

  2. 2.

    Vicky is referring to the march held on Saturday 2 February 2013, organised in support of the K-Vox at a time when it was threatened with evacuation after the police had already closed down two occupations just outside Exarchia, Villa Amalias and Skaramagà, between December 2012 and January 2013. Promoted by all of the quarter’s social centres and committees, the demonstration was launched a few days earlier during a press conference held at Tsamadou Street n. 15. One of the spokespeople was Eleni Portaliou, a professor at the Faculty of Architecture with long-standing ties to Exarchia, politically aligned with Syriza, with which she ran for Mayor of Athens as part of the Open City list in the 2010 municipal elections.

  3. 3.

    Vicky uses the term bachali, somewhere between “hooligans” and “troublemakers”, which is generally used for these groups. The media, on the other hand, have coined the term koukoulofori (hoodies) to disparagingly refer to the so-called black bloc.

  4. 4.

    The building lacked fire prevention certification. That day, furthermore, the safety exit found on the ground floor was locked and the remote control required to open it had been lost, while the other two exits on the first and third floors were blocked, forcing the fourteen survivors to search for an escape through a door that by chance had been left open, to allow a foul-smelling bathroom to be ventilated.

  5. 5.

    In July 2013, the administrator of the Marfin Bank, the branch’s manager and vice-manager, and the head of security were condemned to twenty-two years of prison for manslaughter (BBC 2013b). The investigations that led in October 2013, two and a half years after the incident, to the arrest of Theodoros Sipsas, accused of having thrown the Molotov cocktail that caused the fire, are much less clear.

  6. 6.

    Loukanikos died in May 2014, at the age of ten, due to respiratory problems caused by exposure to the chemicals contained in tear gas (The Guardian 2014b).

  7. 7.

    “As a result of the recession and the adjustment programme, there has been an increase in homelessness since 2009, estimated at 25 per cent. Non-governmental organizations estimate that at least 20,000 people are now homeless” (UN Human Rights Council 2013).

  8. 8.

    “A 52 per cent increase in HIV infections was reported from 2010 to 2011. Reports indicate that, although initially blamed on sex workers and irregular migrants, the outbreak was mainly due to unsafe injecting practices among drug addicts, especially desperate young Greeks facing unemployment who had turned to drugs” (UN Human Rights Council 2013). As regards the detention of persons for the purpose of forcibly testing for HIV and the publication of sensitive personal and medical data, the same report stressed how the Thetis operation violated rights on personal security, privacy and the confidentiality of personal health information, as established by the main international covenants.

  9. 9.

    This type of segregation is expressed in terms of height: apartment buildings with five to eight floors follow a social and ethnic-racial hierarchy that proceeds from the small and dark basements, destined to the rent market and occupied by migrants, to the upper floors which are brighter and more spacious, with a better view and less noise, where middle-class owners generally live (Maloutas et al. 2012). It is also worthwhile to mention the debate revolving around the terms “segregation” and “differentiation”, which both denote this type of spatial and social distribution.

  10. 10.

    The area commissioner was among those arrested during the judiciary operation set into effect against Golden Dawn soon after the killing of Pavlos Fissas. In 2009, moreover, another policeman “publicly shredded the Koran, causing a violent reaction among Muslims, who clashed with the police for two days” (Deliolanes 2013). Additionally, it is noteworthy that “the government vice minister, Markoyiannakis, who was responsible for the police - in an unprecedented act - personally visited one of the anti-migratory rallies of Ayios Panteleimonas in July 2009 to chat with the ‘enraged local residents’. After that meeting, neo-Nazis left Ayios Panteleimonas Square and attacked one of the oldest anarchist social cents in the city: Villa Amalias (…) Indeed, the close links between police and GD are not a local problem of Ayios Panteleimonas; this became apparent in the elections of May and June 2012, when approximately half of police officers on duty in the headquarters of Athens police voted for GD” (Dalakoglou 2013).

  11. 11.

    On a national level, “from 0.29 percent (circa 20,000 votes) in the parliamentary elections of 2009, in the elections of 2012 GD received circa 7 percent of votes (over 400,000). Within the same period, GD from a party of a couple offices and a couple of hundreds of activists grew physically in a party of over fifty local branches/offices and several thousand active members” (Dalakoglou 2013).

  12. 12.

    Located in the neighbourhood of Psirri, in the middle of the historical centre, Embros is Athens’s occupied theatre. The building was constructed in 1930 and used as a print shop for the newspaper of the same name. Declared a historical monument in 1989, between 1988 and 2007 it hosted first the Morphes Theatre Organisation and then the Embros Company. After remaining closed and abandoned for almost five years, in November 2011 is was occupied thanks to an initiative of the Mavili art collective, acting together with neighbourhood residents and other artistic groups. The Embros occupation is part of an ongoing battle for the commons and collective property, and describes itself as “a vital space for coexistence, expressive experimentation and the creation of self-organised, anti-hierarchical and anti-commercial solidarity initiatives” (Embros 2011).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. La Sapienza University, Rome, Italy

    Monia Cappuccini

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  1. Monia Cappuccini
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Cappuccini, M. (2018). Number Thirteen. In: Austerity & Democracy in Athens. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-64128-7_5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-64128-7_5

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  • Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-64127-0

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-64128-7

  • eBook Packages: Social SciencesSocial Sciences (R0)

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