Abstract
This chapter takes us inside the occupied building adjacent to the Steki Metanaston, knocking on the doors of the Residents’ Initiative and the Social Solidarity Network, and looking into the small self-managed garden situated directly opposite the building and Navarinou Park, whose social and political activism takes place in this location. Providing details as to each of these assemblies, Olga, Andreas, Afroditi, Stratoula, Babis, Georgia and Dimitris offer a collective voice, which tells of an everyday battle between hope and desperation, as well as a neighbourhood where human relations still make the difference. In Exarchia, at least, solidarity cannot so easily be mistaken for charity, while hope can be born out of a tiny piece of cement and grow into a flowering mimosa tree.
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Notes
- 1.
As of 2015, the Exarchia Committee left Tsamadou 15. Owing to internal divergences, the group split into two distinct collectives based, respectively, in Kallidromiou and Arachovis Streets.
- 2.
As highlighted by Lekakis & Kousis (2013), these emergency situations have worsened due to the increase in the price of heating fuel as a state revenue-raising measure demanded by the second Memorandum package. This led “to a massive substitution of central heating oil with wood, other fuel and, by some, even dangerous but available materials including, for example, old furniture and plastics. The result has been a new smog over Greek cities on all cold nights, containing particulate matter (PM2.5), sulphur dioxide, carbon monoxide and other harmful pollutants, at least five times higher than acceptable levels (National Observatory of Athens 2013), with considerable health and climate effects. However, at the time of writing in April 2013, the Troika has so far refused to allow this tax to be reduced, despite the fact that as a revenue-raising measure it has not brought the expected results”.
- 3.
He is referring to Golden Dawn’s central offices in Athens, located in Diligianni Street, close to the main railway station.
- 4.
The virgin forest of Skouries is found in the Chalkidikian peninsula in northeastern Greece, and is a highly interesting natural reserve. A few years ago the multinational company Eldorado Gold established itself in the area to begin large-scale gold mining activities, backed by private local interests, that led to irreversible damage to the ecosystem. A large-scale movement of opposition and resistance was born in the local communities, severely criticised and oppressed by the authorities and the government (AntiGold Greece 2012).
- 5.
In May 2008, the Residents’ Initiative (2008) promoted a popular petition to ask for “the immediate withdrawal of the special police forces instantiated in our neighbourhood [and to denounce] the use, under the least excuse, of cancer-causing chemical substances that represent a threat to our health and that of our children”.
- 6.
Found along nearby Akadimias Street, Athens’ Opera House was occupied in January 2009 by its employees and other precarious workers in the field of the arts, in the wake of the revolts that broke out in December 2008.
- 7.
“People in the area often call the park ‘December park’, not only because it is close to the point where Grigoropoulos was assassinated, but also because the park would not have been born without the collective empowerment and confidence gained for radical activities in the aftermath of the revolt” ( Vradis and Dalakoglou 2011).
- 8.
Even previously, and in various occasions, the police had attacked the park in retaliation for Exarchia’s involvement in the urban resistance movement against the crisis. As Vradis and Dalakoglou have chronicled, for example, “on the night of April 12, 2010—one day after arranging the details of a major loan from the IMF, the ECB, and the EU (the so-called Troika , see Glossary)—Greek authorities sent hundreds of police special forces to raid Navarinou Park, where they beat up and detained more than seventy people. Because of its potential as a base from which the new policies and measures related to the Government-Troika deal could be opposed, the very first target the Greek state chose was the park” (2011).
- 9.
It should be mentioned that, between 2009 and 2013, PASOK’s central offices had temporarily been transferred to the corner of Navarinou and Ippokratous Streets, still quite near to the park. After the transfer had been completed, the Residents’ Initiative (2008) promoted a petition for the MAT forces to be removed from Charilaou Trikoupi, following an episode that occurred on 9 September 2014, when a resident couple met with insults and intimidations and were eventually arrested, after having asked the anti-riot police to turn off the van’s motor so that they could sleep at night.
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Cappuccini, M. (2018). Number Fifteen. In: Austerity & Democracy in Athens. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-64128-7_6
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