Blog Post: December 6th in Athens
The following is a blog post I wrote last year while in Athens on December 6th 2018, the 10th anniversary of the murder of an unarmed 15 year old boy Alexis Grigooropolous, by police in Exarcheia.
The police officer who killed him was released from prison early as one of the first acts of New Democracy’s rule.
There are riots in Athens on this day every year.
Every time I get the metro to the airport it rains. Not drizzle. Biblical, tsunami-sounding rain. The kind that hammers through your jacket onto your soul.
He walks me to the station. My mother told me to never talk to strangers. But there’s something different about this one, as he says goodbye.
Athens is a city teetering on the brink of extinction by modernisation, hanging off the edge of the world. Exarchia, my neighbourhood, is the exposed nerve ending that leads directly to the heart of the city. Every now and then, some violent injustice will trigger a reaction, send the police helicopters over Acropolis.
We broke onto the roof of our apartment building one afternoon in October but we don’t go up on these nights for fear of being spotted by a helicopter, our status as innocent bystanders misinterpreted.
The anarchists, usually so divided, have united in the face of this common enemy. They talk till the early hours of the morning in empty buildings dimly lit by fire-spinners about how they can stop the gentrification and police intervention in this neighbourhood they love so dearly. And who can blame them?
Walking down Exarchia’s painted streets I feel the sudden urge to call them home. They feel so familiar to me despite the fact that they are unknown, strange like the curve of the hips of a stranger bared to me for the first time, on the first night.
You can never see so many stars in cities, but you can usually see the moon.
Tonight I look up and the moon is gone, disappeared behind a dense white fog that hangs on my neighbourhood like tar, serving as a visceral reminder of all the wrongs committed in these streets, past and present. I leave my apartment and immediately start crying. Tear gas ruins your eyeliner.
It’s 9pm on a Saturday night, which is also the anniversary of the annual riot and the bars, usually full of people making music and getting drunk, have become safehouses packed full of regular citizens trying escape the thick cloud of tear gas. These streets I know so well have turned orange with bonfires burning bright like cars set alight with the anger of a thousand people.
They are not my people, but I feel their anger. I’m wearing their flag. These streets are now a war zone.
We decide to leave and go meet a friend I’m staying with in a bar, but trying to get out of Exarchia is a struggle. Fireworks are thrown down a different side street every few minutes, and each time people shouting in a language I don’t yet know tell us all to get out of the way. It’s beautiful like jazz, chaotic symmetry creating more chaos.
Running away from explosions with the bittersweet energy of a beatnik poem whose author died long ago, we shamble down these streets like we’ve been doing our whole lives.
We’re crying but we’re laughing and it is with smoke in my hair and tears in my eyes that I realise this city is the man I love.The trees from the sidewalk are dragged to the middle of the road to block the cops from moving north. I walk past them and a man in a balaclava asks me which way they were headed.
It is then I realise that this city is on fire.
Through the fogI see the grinning face of a friend running towards me
“Fancy seeing you in a place like this,” he says. “You English people bring the rain,” he says as he lights up a cigarette. We’ve stopped running. “That’s what we need. Some rain.”
“I can do a rain dance?” I say, half-joking, and he smiles. We dance in the middle of the street, in the middle of the riot. Minutes later, I feel the rain on my forehead and for a second, we’ve won.
Tear gas dissolves in the rain, you should know.
But the war won’t end. Next year they’ll rehearse another revolution. No one ever wins.
Everyone loses in the end.All there is left to do is dance, dance in the rain.
