Abstract
Remember remember the 6th of December... It was a Saturday night like many others in Exarchia, when Alexandros Grigropoulos, a 15-year-old high school student from an upper-middle-class family, was shot for no specific reason by a policeman who was patrolling the area. Starting from Exarchia, this fateful event shortly triggered all over Athens and other major Greek cities in an endless spiral of violent riots, which unfolded alongside mass mobilisations on a large scale. As a consequence, December 2008 represented a breaking point in the country’s modern history, for it marked an end and a beginning. This chapter is focused on that outburst, examined by retracing the more recent “eruptions” of Greek fire through to the fatal “rupture” seen during the days of Alexis.
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Notes
- 1.
Korkoneas was suspended from service and later convicted, as was the second police officer, Vassilis Saraliotis. They received, respectively, a life sentence for premeditated murder and ten years’ imprisonment for complicity. The conservative government of the time, led by Kostas Karamanlis (ND), tried to placate the mounting discontent over Grigoropoulos’s death with a letter of condolence to the teenager’s family, followed in the end by the apologies of Hellenic police as well.
- 2.
He is referring to the anti-fascist demonstrations on scooters or motorbikes organised by anarchists in 2012 in the neighbourhoods of Aghios Panteleimonas , Victoria and Patissia.
- 3.
Owned by the government authority for the construction of public schools OSK (Organismos Scolikon Ktiron), this building with a beautiful garden was squatted in order to protect one of the last remaining green areas in the neighbourhood. Until present, it has been managed by a residents’ committee affiliated with the ex-party of the Alternative Ecologists (Ikologeì Enallaktikì).
- 4.
In February 2013, Nikos Romanos, Dimitris-Andreas Bourzoukos, Yiannis Michailidis and Dimitris Politis were arrested and charged with armed robbery for the events seen at the Bank of Agriculture and the Post Office of Velvedo, in north-central Greece. The mug shots transmitted to the press soon after their capture left no doubt as to the abuse to which they had been subjected, despite the sloppy attempts of the police to erase its traces using Photoshop. In November 2014, the young men were sentenced to 15 years in prison for participating in the armed bank robbery, and escaped charges of being members of the Conspiracy of Fire Cells—one of the two main urban guerrilla organisations born after December 2008, a second group is called the Sect of Revolutionaries—to which however they attributed responsibility for their action. Among the convicted is Nikos Romanos, a friend of Alexis Grigoropoulos, who died in his arms the night of the shooting in Exarchia. In the month following the verdict on Velvedo case, the young anarchist went on a hunger strike, after having been refused the study permits provided for by law. His cause kindled once again the fires of protest in the country (even the doctors of the hospital refused to proceed with force-feeding), with particularly violent results that coincided with the sixth anniversary of December 2008. Only on 10 December, when Romanos also began a thirst strike, did the Parliament finally approve an amendment allowing him to attend university classes wearing an electronic bracelet (Megaloudi 2014).
References
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Cappuccini, M. (2018). Greek Fire. In: Austerity & Democracy in Athens. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-64128-7_9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-64128-7_9
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