Athens: Anarchists and Antigone

The Polytechnic University of Athens, on a bright day.

The first apartment we stayed in was located north of the center of the city, near the National Museum of Archaeology and the Polytechnic University. Last year we stayed in a tiny room in a less-than-stellar hotel in the touristic center near the Acropolis - a great location, with good breakfasts, but we could barely turn around in either the bedroom or the bath, and we heard loud guests at every hour of the day or night. This time we wanted a larger, quieter place where we could cook, and learn about another part of the city. The apartment we rented turned out to be perfect. It was on the seventh floor, with a wide balcony that looked out over the buildings and courtyard of the Technical University, site of historic resistance by students against the military junta that ruled Greece between 1967 and 1974. On November 17, 1973, after several days of escalating student demonstrations, armed police crashed through the university gates with a tank. 24 civilians, including students and a young boy, were killed, and hundreds injured, though the official government inquiry disputed these deaths. Nevertheless, this catastrophe triggered events that led to the fall of the government the following July.

After that, a law was passed making university campuses safe zones, where the police cannot enter. The Polytechnic became the main site of resistance movements, and the home of the contemporary Greek anarchist movement. The neighborhood around the campus is called Exarchia, and is controlled by anarchist groups, but we didn't feel any threat from them -- rather than being against authority in all forms, their philosophy seems to be a bit more subtle: they're against the police, capitalism, globalization, and fascism, supportive of immigrants and refugees who they see as victims of capitalistic military actions and policies.

A poster in the neighborhood. The headline at the top reads "οχι αλλοι νεκροι, οχι αλλα στρατοπεδα συγκεντρωσης", "No more dead, no more concentration camps."

Our apartment host explained that the main university building was now occupied by students, and while the area was safe, she was glad we wouldn't be there on the 17th, because that was an annual day of demonstrations, when the anarchists and police always clashed, sometimes violently, with some danger from tear gas, Molotov cocktails and the like. While we were in residence, we watched the students coming and going, as well as faculty -- apparently classes were still going on in some of the other buildings. Graffiti, posters, and large homemade banners in a several-block radius indicated the presence of active resistance by these anarchists, with messages of solidarity with refugees and migrants -- of which Greece has a disproportionate number, many in controversial detention camps -- and anti-capitalist slogans. One weekend night, there was a demonstration that went on into the wee hours, with speeches followed by live music; we had a ringside seat, but couldn't tell what was really going on.

A pencil sketch from our balcony, looking toward the courtyard of the Archaeology Museum.

The buildings of the Polytechnic University are gorgeous examples of neo-classical architecture, designed by the architect Lysandros Kaftantzoglou (1811–1885) who would not be happy to see their current condition. From our balcony we looked down over the tiled roofs of two open, colonnaded buildings modeled after the classical stoa, or marketplace with columns, common to all public agoras in ancient times, and the beautifully-proportioned main building, with its pediment and Ionic columns flanked by staircases. Part of the roof of this building has fallen in. There's a courtyard and garden filled with flowering plants and trees, and, closer to the street, monuments to the fallen students as well as the remains of the gate that was smashed by the tank back in 1973.

Socrates (right) and Plato (left) presiding over the entrance to the Academy of Athens -- the name harkening back to Plato's Academy --which is the country's national academy and highest research institution, where work is divided into three orders: Natural Sciences, Letters and Arts, Moral and Political Sciences.

Anarchistic thought has a long history in Greece, going all the way back to Socrates, who, if not being an out-and-out anarchist in a modern sense, taught his students to continually question authority, and value above all one's right to a free will. He was tried and put to death because of his criticism of the political authority and direction of the Athenian state at the time. (As a political concept, Αναρχια, "anarchy," is a Greek word that first appears in plays by Aeschylus and Sophocles around the same time, in the fifth C. BC.)

A copy of Sophocles' Antigone in modern Greek that I bought in an Athenian used bookstore. I can read the Greek alphabet and had three years of university-level ancient Greek, but don't know the modern language at all. I can only decipher it with difficulty and the help of translation programs. I've forgotten most of the ancient Greek I once knew, but I thought I might compare this text to the original and learn something: intellectual folly, probably, but it was one of those things you see when traveling, and just want to have.

As one article I read pointed out, Sophocles' play Antigone is centered on the anarchist question of whether the young protagonist, Antigone, is right to exercise her free will against both family and the authorities -- to choose to properly bury her brother against the advice of her sister, and the express decree of the king, who has forbidden the burial because her brother had died fighting against that state.

Posters for (I think) current theater productions in Athens. Sophocles' Antigone on the left, a play titled The Building" on the right.

These are human questions that have persisted throughout recorded time. It's not surprising to me that this Greek play not only continues to be performed, 2500 years after it was written, but has also inspired a number of recent works, such as Kamila Shamsie's novel Home Fire, in which a young British woman rejects her sister's (and the state's) prohibitions by trying to aid, and then bury, her brother who left Britain to fight for ISIS, then regrets his decision and tries to return home. We still have a very difficult time deciding which is the highest "right": following the authority and wishes of one's family or one's country, or doing what an individual feels to be right and just, according to their own conscience or spiritual convictions, even if the penalty is ostracism, exile, or death. Jesus' difficult and hotly-debated parable in Luke 14:26, "If anyone comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters--yes, even their own life--such a person cannot be my disciple," speaks to much the same issue.

Here in Quebec, we also have a new film titled Antigone. The writer/director Sophie Deraspe said she was inspired by her reading of the play many years before, and by the story of Fredy Villaneuva, who was killed by a Montreal police officer in 2008 after an illegal game of dice in Henri-Bourassa park escalated into a physical confrontation with police. The film is about a girl in a Montreal refugee family whose brother is shot and killed by police. Against the wishes of her family, she tries to save her remaining brother, who has been arrested and faces deportation, and then runs afoul of the law herself. 

Socrates would be right at home.

Comments

[Natalie]

Wonderfully detailed and thoughtful report,Beth. You have a real flair for journalism as well as great visual observation.

Some years ago when I first went to Greece (but only to Aegina) I resolved to learn Greek when I got back. I signed up for classes taught by a marvellous Greek teacher (who became a friend) and kept at it for about a year. Alas, the project dissolved because I couldn't give enough attention to it. I often overestimate my capacity for muli-tasking. I wonder if you've attempted to learn the language?

If Socrates was alive today he would be in utter despair at the state of our 'civilization'.

[Roderick Robinson]

All those world famous authors I have never read, all those works that have remained unseen. Why did I choose the route of pig ignorance? Perhaps because in my youth Hellenists were so lofty, so mystically absorbed that I saw them as part of the Establishment I was seeking to avoid. Those who told me I should do things "for your (ie, my) own good". And when, finally, the curtain lifted a little, thanks in no small part to James Joyce, it was too late; what little I know about Mediterranean culture is as broken and as scattered as the many ruins of that civilisation.

But your references to Greece's post-war troubles evoked a vivid moment in the early seventies with Costa-Grivas' polemical movie, Z, starring Yves Montand. (Best Foreign Film Oscar; it should have been simply Best Film). The cruelty of those times. The Colonels were no joke and yet C-G used humour in a way Hannah Arendt applied that strange noun (banality) to the phenomenon of evil.

The way these puffed-up Army officers uttered their denunciations and then, to escape questioning, more than once left the confrontation by the wrong exit and found themselves up against a locked door. Furiously rattling the door-knob. And when, finally, the press caught up with the leader and asked him if the death of Z (left-wing subversive) might prove to be the Colonels' equivalent of the Dreyfus Case, the leader - sweating in his unsuitable uniform and pop-eyed with rage - turned to his tormenter and shrieked "Dreyfus! Dreyfus!! He was guilty!!!" European history condensed into five words. Greece continues to educate us.

[Beth]

Thanks, Natalie. I'm working on modern Greek now. We'll see whether I stick to it or not! And yes, I agree about what Socrates would think.

Robbie, you're anything but ignorant. It's unfortunate how ancient classical study has been presented, especially in Britain -- it seems absolutely elitist, as well as only recently open to divergent views from those whose background and cultural heritage does not derive in a straight line from the Greeks and Romans, as we were led to believe. how I ended up there is a long story, but I've certainly never considered it made me superior in any way. In fact, studying Greek made me feel quite stupid at times, compared to those for whom it was apparently easy.

Thanks for reminding me about the movie Z, which I saw during college -- I should definitely revisit it, all these years later! It made little sense tome at the time, but I seem to remember that I was under the influence of something when I saw that movie! It was the 60s/early 70s, after all.

[Roderick Robinson]

"under the influence of something" - proof you weren't on the side of the Colonels. Good on yer, as the Australians say.