The City That Made Me an Organiser
Hello Subvrt readers —
The sun is slipping into the Saronic Gulf past the traffic on Poseidonos Avenue and I’m in a chain café waiting for my son to finish robotics class, or AI, or VR or coding or something beyond my understanding. I’m sitting outside because it’s May and already the evenings are in the low 20s — the café speakers are tinny and broadcasting that emo pop that started playing in 2014 and never stopped, with vocal melodies a child could tap out on a piano, repeated with only the words changing. It’s an invitation for me to turn on Vibes, an app which makes AI-generated, infinitely better music.
This is Athens, my home since last summer. But not as I knew it when I lived here last, from 2011 to 2016. Everyone’s earbuds are wireless. The selfie sticks that were a craze when I left are now barely visible. There are new boutique hotels, hotels that don’t look like hotels, hotels that are being worked on. Airbnb locks dot the walls in my neighborhood. There seem to be more tourists, and they’re better dressed, more refined. It’s hotter.
The attitude of the locals here, though, is the same as ever. I’d missed it all those years away. When I cross a street with my young daughter, drivers stop for me. Arrived at the café before opening time? Not a problem; sit down while we’re getting things ready. And so on. Interactions feel more human.
That didn’t happen so often in Chania, where I used to live, which for all its charm and history and wild surroundings is more conservative, more closed.
Of course, everything’s cramped in Athens, more cramped but there’s also something magical about sitting on your cramped balcony on a warm night hearing people chatter around you on theirs, and quieter voices in the narrow streets below, carried off by the rumble of the city.
And from the top of a hill (and Athens has many), you can almost — almost — convince yourself the concrete landscape between the mountains is a sea, and the hum of the traffic is the wind sweeping over it.
* * *
Most prominently, though, Athens for me stirs memories of political upheaval, of the brutal economic crisis of the early 2010s, and how Greeks reacted to it. And this is something I’m thinking a lot about at the moment, because on June 5 in Italy I’ll be exhibiting a photo project I made during that period, that tried to depict some of those feelings. (The images here are part of that work.)
Memories like the winter night in 2013 when I wandered into a gathering of Greece’s neo-nazi party, Golden Dawn, on Michalakopoulou Street, trying to look innocuous and as Greek as possible as the chants of the thousand-strong crowd echoed off the buildings and reached a rhythmic crescendo before the march. The frightened faces of the onlookers troubled me the most, through their windows in apartments and cars. It was terrifying and exhilarating.
Or memories of Abariza, the wood-panelled bar on Lekka Street, where at the height of the crisis I’d invite anyone doing anything interesting online for coffee, such was my yearning for collaboration and connection and common cause. Or of nearby Omikron Bar, where I assembled a team of creatives that ended up making a modest dent in how Greeks were seen abroad, after years of stereotyping had crushed their image and their confidence.
Or of Syntagma Square itself, that infamous epicentre of protest. Not memories of the marches, nor the clashes that routinely ended them, but the individual stories that played out there.
Like that of my friend Antonis, who met his future wife at a rally in the square (TIME magazine even wrote about it). Or of Dimitris Christoulas, the retired pharmacist who shot himself dead under a tree in Syntagma on a busy Wednesday morning in 2012. It was a political act, the violence of austerity captured and made explicit. His suicide note read: “One day, I believe, the youth with no future will take up arms and hang the national traitors.”
Today, those traitors are still in power, and nothing marks the tree where Christoulas ended his life. Golden Dawn is history, jailed and banned, though their worldview lives on in parties that wear suits instead of tattoos. Antonis is divorced.
And both Abariza and Omikron Bar are long gone, metastatically absorbed by the same boutique hotel behind a front of fake flowers. When I heard it was Israeli-owned, I had to check my biases. First I groaned; then seethed at the audacity of the project. Then I wondered if they were Likud-hating liberals from Tel Aviv. Then I came back around to simply lamenting that my old haunts were no longer there.
Nobody talks about a Greek crisis anymore, but that doesn’t mean all is well here. The right-wing government, despite scandal after scandal, keeps on keeping on. The activist energy has dissipated, or maybe decentralised. My 2023 prediction of a grassroots re-awakening now seems like wishcasting.
But for all its tragic consequences, the Greek economic crisis was also a time of community, of experimentation, of fleeting beauty amid the chaos and injustice. I was always an outsider, but I lived it and felt it. More than anything else, that period defined me as an organiser.
* * *
It’s dark now at Poseidonos Avenue. Robotics, or whatever it was, is over. My son runs out and we walk to the car together. I tell him I’ve been reminiscing about when we last lived in Athens and how it fed into my photo project. He nods but he’s already onto something else: what are we going to eat tonight?
See you next week,
Mehran
PS My full photo project on the Greek crisis (22 images) is here.