Feminist protest in Plataea Exarchia
The name Exarchia means “outside control”. For over a half-century, these graffiti covered blocks of Central Athens have symbolized resistance against state authority. It was here, in the Polytechnic University, that student protests started the wave that brought down Greece’s military junta, and it was here, in 2008, where the police murdered a baby-faced teen named Alexandros Grigoropolous and thus provoked riots whose ferocity would live forever of a thousand anarchist YouTube channels. It is a neighborhood whose walls scream Migrants Welcome, Cops Go to Hell. In 2014, when hundreds of thousands of humans fled through Greece from the charnel houses of Syria and Afghanistan, Exarchia hosted tens of thousands of them in squats whose conditions, however rough, were far better than those in the government’s concentration camps - and which were run on the ideals of participatory self-rule and anti-racist solidarity. I remember graffiti that read “Foreigners. and Greeks. We Live Together. We Work Together. We Bash Nazis Together.” So it was. There were problems of course. Dealers dealt drugs in the central square (though the anarchists tried to suppress them). Friday night punch ups between anarchists and cops that tore up the pavement and filled apartments with teargas. But it was a neighborhood unlike any other, where ordinary people had for generations built an island of exception and autonomy. When I first visited a decade ago, I loved it like a fairy land.
Exarchia means outside control. Obviously, this would make it few friends with the state. Even five years ago, police did not enter except as invaders, padded as football quarterbacks, armed with gas masks and clubs; they were quickly chased out. When, in 2019, the far-right New Democracy government swore to break Exarchia, it did not work at first. An illustrative example - they tried to put a Christmas tree in the main square. The neighborhood burnt it. They put up another. The neighborhood burnt it again, then decorated the blackened hulk. Fuck you. These blocks are ours.
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