The conventional story about Greece went like this: When Greece joined the European Union, it was poor and fractious. Andreas Papandreou, who came to power on a platform of fiery anti-American populism, reunited the country by offering generous social services, all of which were buoyed by European Union money flowing into the country. Bad habits continued: employment for life in the public sector, politicians with stuffed pockets, an aversion to foreign investment, snail-like growth, a communal lifestyle that kept people happy at the taverna table but stifled individual creativity, a national belief that beating the “system” was something the smart people did. Then, the world economy collapsed. In Greece, the old habits became harder to conceal, but like the wife of an alcoholic who refuses to notice the vodka bottle stashed in the closet, the European Union looked the other way.
The Greek people, however, were watching. In 2008, riots tore Athens apart. The Greek police shot a fifteen-year-old kid named Alexis Grigoropoulos, and for weeks afterward, high school students and anarchists charged through the streets. “Fuck sixty-eight, fight now!” declared the protestors. The Greek youth lacked jobs, adequate education, and, in a country riven by cronyism and nepotism, a future. They had also noticed that the new flood of money from the West had not filtered down to their own lives, or to the services and universities they needed. “The flames may die down but the coals will simmer,” one young protestor told The Guardian at the time. “One little thing, and you’ll see it will ignite again. Ours is a future without work, without hope. Our grievances are so big, so many. Only a very strong government can stop the rot.” The kids cited 1967 and 1974—neither dates about which I knew much—as inspirations for 2008. “They have no hope in the current system,” a Greek shipping magnate told me about the young people in the streets, “and their only hope is in breaking everything and starting anew.” When I visited, the protests had continued, the riot police—outfitted with shields, billy clubs, tear gas guns, and nine-millimeters—following clusters of anarchists wearing black hoodies, boots, and backpacks, the international uniform of the twenty-first-century’s warrior class.
The rest of the protestors looked rather upscale. They walked slowly and patiently to the head of Syntagma Square, where the lovely yellow Parliament building overlooked the area from a hill. At sunset, in that truly celestial Athens light, the rest of the square would be in shadow, but the Parliament building glowed. This was where the protestors of Athens spent their days shaking their fists and trying to break down the doors. Greeks ignored, if not tolerated and condoned, a certain level of dissident violence. The Greeks believe in protest, this is how they live, I thought, at that point still having no idea in what such a belief had been rooted.
*
ONE EVENING I WENT TO SEE where the refugees lived, in a neighborhood called Sofokleous, which was close to the center of the town but tucked away from the tourists. The whole world seemed to be there: the Congolese and the Pakistanis, the Bangladeshis and the Afghans, the Kurds, the Iraqis, the Somalis, the Moroccans and the Nigerians. They dreamed of being smuggled deeper into Europe, but if they got caught by the police, they were thrown back to Greece, the first European country they entered. The Greeks were suffering from a financial crisis wrought by the West and a refugee crisis brought on, to a large extent, by the wars of the West. Long before the war in Syria sent thousands more refugees to its shores, the world crises were converging in Greece.
It was a Sunday, and the Sofokleous streets were empty. My friend Iason, a journalist who had reported from Iran and Afghanistan, told me to leave my handbag at home and to dress down, in the hopes that we’d appear like heroin addicts looking for a fix. Only three years ago, this had been a stylish part of town. Then the police decided to push the refugees out of the main city squares where they often lingered, essentially corralling them into these back streets. In a country with little industry and few jobs, there wasn’t much for these foreigners to do but sell handbags, toys, drugs, or their bodies.
I expected to see a neighborhood similar to the bad parts of West Philadelphia, but I was wrong. As we began our walk down the main thoroughfare, beautiful Athens seemed to fall away, and off a dystopian cliff: Sofokleous was where the dispossessed had been sent to rot. Some refugees looked healthy, selling socks off the sidewalk, screaming at one another. But others were bloodied and beaten, their clothes half ripped off, shoes missing. To our left, we saw three men sticking needles into their ankles; to our right, a woman sidled up to a man for some drugs. One woman’s flesh seemed to be melting off her. Iason told me to walk quickly.
Turning up a side street, we spotted a man sitting inside a taverna called Klimataria, which first opened in 1927, when Athens was a cow town. Big barrels of wine stood against one wall; enormous pots hung from the ceilings. It looked like a happy place. It was empty. Business had declined by 70 percent, we were told, and soon the restaurant would be moving. The owner, Pericles Spiridou, had thick, wavy white hair, like the gods, and sat alone at a table with a pen and notepad.
“The immigrants sometimes attack each other in the street with swords,” he said.
Tourists who came to Klimataria fled with fear. Spiridou was a liberal-minded person. He didn’t disparage the immigrants themselves. Instead, he spoke of politics.
“Where is the regulation?” he said. “Where is the police? The state does nothing. No one has any control.”
The state was at fault, but his words conjured notions of forces too big, of changes too massive, coming from places too mysterious. Spiridou was still waiting for some sense to be made of it all. Who were these people? Would anybody do anything about it? Where would they go? Spiridou was forty-nine years old. He had existential concerns. He was sitting at his taverna, seeing a financial crisis coming from the west, refugees coming from the east and south, and his restaurant becoming too dangerous to operate.
“We’ve lived through many things,” Spiridou said. He looked heartbroken for a moment, and then angry. “Civil war, a dictatorship, the fall of communism. Now what I hope is that I live to see the fall of capitalism. That’s my dream. And I will see it.”
His leftist language surprised me then, but soon everyone would be discussing capitalism in this way, like any other phase of history, one that would pass.
*
I USUALLY BEGAN my interviews in Athens with the same question: “How did Greece get to this place?” The narrative for why the Greeks were so angry was first explained to me by a political scientist named Stathis Kalyvas. I was relieved to find Kalyvas, and of all the nuances and details he explained to me that day, I clung to the one statement of his that fit into the worn lock of my consciousness like a key.