Riots in Athens?

The headlines for ATHENS are terrifying tales of masked youths and looters running wild through the streets. The violence, triggered by the police shooting of a teenager, has now entered it's fourth night. Media outlets have reported that the violence has escalated to the point it threatens to topple the Greek Government.

Shortly after reading reports and watching clips on-line I received this letter from a woman visiting Athens. Her report puts a different perspective on the extent of the riots.

From: Carole Heiman Kezios
[mailto:carole@athenspenthouses.com]
Subject: Those "riots" in Athens ....

I don’t know if you have seen the news reports about what is happening in Athens – but I thought I would send you this update and my take on things in case you have been watching the news – for those of my friends who have been involved in political campaigns and the like, the way stories get “altered” by the press, the way reporting gets distorted, accounts twisted and exaggerated and / or minimized won’t be anything new to you:
We arrived back in Athens on Sunday afternoon, learning about the “riots” from Yannis, the driver who often picks up our guests and usually meets us when we arrive at the airport as well.
Yannis told us that earlier in the day and the night before there had been chaos around the Polytechnio (The Technical University of Athens) over the fatal shooting by a police officer of a 15 year old boy. He did not know at that time the details surrounding the shooting, but he did know that there were groups of teens burning things, smashing windows and in general causing mayhem in this particular area, as well as in an area a Ministry building around Panormou (neither of which are near our neighborhood). Since we had returned to Athens for my mother in law’s funeral, we left Athens early Monday morning to go to Tripolis. We traveled through the city and traffic (and everything else) seemed pretty normal (there was the usual morning traffic, a bit of a jam on the highway, nothing out of the ordinary).

Protests and demonstrations are a familiar part of Greek life, we are used to them, people staying in hotels or working around Syntagma Square (the Square across from the Greek Parliament building) are used to them, and the Athens police force has “moveable” precincts, which they frequently deploy to close off streets as marches move through the city. I’ve witnessed many over the years, and though I’ve found them annoying if I was in a hurry, I’ve always sort of admired the way they are here: In the US demonstrators are often given a “square” area to march in circles. In Greece the people take to the streets, marching from one part of the city to a particular government building depending on what they are protesting. To me it is the ultimate in democracy – lovely to me since I witness this in the birthplace of democracy. (Some of our guests have even taken their kids to see them, to illustrate democracy in action!) I also find them somewhat entertaining, as Greeks, being the passionate people they are, lovers of drama and exaggeration, will latch on to a government proposal or recently passed piece of legislation, and ultimately someone will have a beef with is, opening up the excuse for either a protest march or a strike or both. I’ve often wondered if they just planned these strikes and demonstrations to accumulate extra vacation time or days off, since these “events” are so well scheduled, planned far in advance, and often coupled with a holiday or even a long weekend. So it was with these thoughts that we took Yannis’ report somewhat with a grain of salt.

But, while in Tripolis on Monday we finally had the chance to watch the news. What we saw left us shocked, and honestly a little bit scared. Every channel showed clips of fires burning, reports of rioters roaming the streets, starting fires and destroying everything on their route, from the Polytechnio campus on the north, down through Omonia Square (a popular centrally located square) and to Syntagma Square. We flipped stations and saw the same scene: fires, fires and more fires – Athens is burning the announcers kept saying. But as we continued to watch, we noticed the same clips running over and over and over again on different stations. And in these clips we would see only a handful of people on the streets, followed by interviews where we learned the police were commanded to have no interactions, no confrontations, no involvement at all, with the “rioters”. After the funeral we had a chance to speak with some of Basil’s relatives who had also driven in from Athens. I asked several of them why the police did not stop these people, and the answer was the same from them all: In the 70’s Greece had a military junta, and during this time the students took over the Polytechnio to protest the military junta, and the government brought in tanks and troops to overcome them, killing 24 people in the process. It is a very sad time in Greece’s history, and most politicians are very sensitive to ordering police crackdowns when youth are involved in protests and demonstrations, for fear of looking like the military junta in 1973. And thus, police were ordered to avoid any confrontations.

We heard conflicting reports as to whether the boy who had been shot and killed was participating in a protest demonstration in which students were throwing rocks at the police who were there to keep them in line, or that he was merely a passerby, in the wrong place at the wrong time. One policeman fired 3 shots, two in the air and one straight ahead – and this boy was struck, apparently by one of the upward fired bullets on its way back down, perhaps. No one seems to know for sure if the shots were aimed at the boy or if he was caught in the crossfire (as I’ve said, there are conflicting reports) – but the policeman was arrested and jailed, as it is not the custom to use real bullets ever during demonstrations (they do use a lot of tear gas and also rubber bullets, perhaps water hoses as well, but never anything that could result in death, for the reasons I listed above).

Late Monday night we returned to Athens, and on Tuesday we again watched the television coverage and read news reports. Hotels evacuated on Syntagma Square, the metro was being shut down, “the city braces for a night worse than any so far” said the newscaster reporting on the funeral of the boy who was killed. The funeral would be at 3 pm, in a southern suburb, and by 4 pm they were reporting that while the funeral was peaceful, in Syntagma protesters tried to “storm the Parliament building” and elsewhere more fires were burning.

We also had a chance to speak with guests in our Beta penthouse – a family with 2 toddlers – they reported walking through Syntagma without anyone bothering them on Monday early in the day, while another guest reported taking the trolley through Syntagma on Monday afternoon, there were some broken windows and burned garbage cans, but nothing that she thought looked like the remains of what she had seen on television the night before.

By this time we decided we needed to get an idea of what was going on, so around 5 PM we set out for the historical center, Plaka and Thissio and then we drove around Omonia Square and through Syntagma Square, down Vasilis Sophias street, with its elegant mansions and museums and through the “Rigillis” area, where the diplomats live and which borders our neighborhood along with the Old Olympic Stadium before we returned home. The streets in the historical center were quiet, many stores and restaurants were closed, but those that were open did have some people eating or drinking coffee, but other than how quiet it was, nothing in this area seemed out of the ordinary, and we didn’t see any damage or destruction. In Thissio, we visited our newly arrived guest at the Heritage House, and again, the streets were quiet, but we saw nothing that could have been attributed to fires, riots or protests. We had dinner at one of our favorite Thissio favorites, giant plates piled with lamb chops, and then wandered back along the Ancient Agora to our favorite dessert place, climbed up to the glass enclosed rooftop of Chocolate Café for coffee, loukoumades and to survey the area from this vantage point. Things looked normal from here – we saw no fires or smoke, there were certainly fewer people below on Apostolou Pavlou, but in general, things seemed normal.

Now for us the real test was to drive through Omonia, Kolonaki and Syntagma – when we reached the intersection where the choice had to be made, a right turn would send us right into the two squares, a left turn would take us in a circle around the historical center, up Sygrou and completely avoid the two “riot zones”. Since I was the only “non Greek” in the car, the Greek obsession with drama won out: we turned right and headed past Gazi (quiet, nothing looked damaged from the street we could see) and into Omonia. As we got about 2 blocks from the square two fire trucks pulled in front of us, lights flashing. There was a collective deep breath, as we could no longer turn around to avoid the Square. The trucks turned into a parking lot a block down, and began hosing down a dilapidated Neo-Classical building that was smoking from the top.

As we continued we saw the streets littered with papers, and the remains of several garbage dumpsters, two or three burned “kiosks”, the corner newsstands which supply Athenians with newspapers, magazine, cigarettes and candy. In the square itself, as in the restaurants and souvlaki stands around the square, people milled about, ate or drank coffee. No one seemed to be “en masse” and it was basically quiet. On the far side of the square we saw one building with the ground floor burned out. From Omonia we drove down Stadiou street, a commercial street with lots of retail, which the news had been reporting to be “devastated and completely destroyed”. Other than the previously mentioned building on the far side of the square, we found no burned buildings, a couple of storefronts had metal covering the windows – we don’t know if this was preventative or a Greek style board up service, although there was no sign of fire on the walls surrounding the windows.

From Stadiou we headed to Akadamias, on the way we saw the remains of a torched BMW. There was one block where 3 storefronts in a row were burned, and 2 blocks before we arrived at Syntagma, across from the University, a corner storefront had been gutted by fire.

In Syntagma Square the 3 luxury hotels, the Grand Bretagne, the King George and the Plaza were all boarded up – they seemed closed to the public and we had heard that all guests had been evacuated. The Square itself was basically quiet, though there were some tourists watching the changing of the guard, some younger people wandering around, some papers littered the street corner and there were the remains of burned garbage cans in front of the Parliament building. The banks lining one side of the Square all had broken windows. We also saw a burned out Eurobank, but now we can’t recall if that was on Syntagma or near Omonia.

Our drive around the square was pretty uneventful. McDonald’s appeared to have applied protective plastic to their windows, as did some of the other stores that appeared unharmed.

So, while the whole country is certainly in mourning over the death of the 15 year old boy, I would say that the media coverage has been greatly exaggerated. Having just returned from the historical center, Syntagma and Omonia squares, I would say that there’s no danger violence or “riots” will impact your stay in Athens. Although I cannot figure out what is behind this, there was a lot of talk on morning TV and radio that the left would like to force new elections, and that in some way they “encouraged” the disappointment in young people which lead to the demonstrations which lead to the shooting which lead to the mayhem. These commentators also said that those in the left who did this certainly never imagined it would go so far. I have another take on things, and though I’m no political commentator, I’ve lived here long enough to have an opinion about it: In reality there were not the “mass riots” described in the news – there were groups of a 6 – 10 angry people, perhaps a couple hundred in all, roaming around Athens, intent on causing destruction. These people have always existed, but the police in the past have been able to control them. The circumstances of the shooting and the order not to get into confrontations meant the police could not act as they would normally have, and things got out of hand, not only on the streets, but in the press as well, until we expected to find the entire central area burned down when we returned to Athens, only to find some pockets of random destruction. (Which I am not saying makes it ok – but really, it was nothing like the 5 of us imagined it would be – and our guests who are here now reported the same thing. Watching the news one would think the world had ended for Athens!)

Unfortunately the mass media in Greece, in its overzealous attempt to make headlines and increase their viewership by creating drama, has made the situation seem far worse than it really is. I’m pretty certain that just as last week’s sensationalized media