Exarchia: A Haven for Migration
When I first arrived in Athens I was distinctly lost. Back home in Pennsylvania, when I was desperate to travel and find something, anything, new in the wooded industrial town, I would turn to my friend who often drove and urge him to keep going until we did not know where we were, to just get lost. It would annoy him to no end, as he knew the streets and roads that enveloped Pittsburgh as if the hundred-mile radius of woven streets had been his backyard. Later, when I had found a bed in this new city, I wrote to him, asking if remembered the midnight drives on I-79 and US-222, when we were both eager to escape, though it mattered not where.
On a sun-drenched morning in early January, a Blue Star ferry arrived in Piraeus port carrying myself, a friend, and a street dog from the island of Lesvos. After an hour of lounging with coffee, my friend and I parted ways, wishing each other good luck, and severing the bond of four months volunteer work. Cody and I were alone and lost. Something, it seemed, had drawn us here.
While tramping through the new city with Cody cataplectic from the roaring crowd now surrounding him, I met up with another friend, a native Greek, who had a mutual connection to the dog I was now trailing through the city. She showed me around and brought me to Exarchia, explaining to me the squat life I had only heard about as legend back home. We wandered to City Plaza on the edge of the anarchist community, the squat that would become my home for four months after a few nights exploring the vast and unknown city, finding shelter for a few hours under awnings and sleeping in various parks. The reality of Athens to a traveler is more fantastic than any dream.
Exarchia is a world within a world, a community that exists outside the jurisdiction of the government yet within a city with the population of 3.8 million people, a number that does not yet encapsulate the men and women who have fled there in recent years. People here come from all over. There are native Greeks, Afghans, Germans, Italians, students, mothers, children. There is the mutual bond of existence within a radical space that ties everyone together, situated in the land of the muses that once housed Julian the Apostate. The streets are the filed networks of a city the grew out of the centuries, with cross-sections turning into parks and collapsing loops of stores.
Tosita street, a pedestrian path next to the Archaeological Museum with police lining the western border, marks one of the entrances to Exarchia. Dogs play with each other in the daytime here, leash-less and free. At night, people take up residence in the doorways and under shading, laying on the cement paths and under the close-cropped trees. They are protected by the residents of the school that was occupied in the 1980s after a wave of protests, that serves as another one of the natural barriers to the community. Blankets abound for warmth, and in the night time, through the haze of the city, one can feel the thousands of years seeping up through the stone.
The Archaeological Museum of Athens serves as one of the boundaries of Exarchia. Image Credit: Forrest Crellin
Whoever sleeps rough here does so in good company. These same streets were once a bed for Socrates, and, if you wake bleary-eyed at night looking towards the flicker of the streetlights in the distance, you may just see the ghost of Diogenes with his faithful troop of dogs, sparking his lantern. The descendants of antiquity mill about in the daytime, and in their eyes you can see the magic of the gods from when the world was young. The bronze has not left the hearts of the people who live among the hills inhabited for four thousand years.
Following straight from Tosita street, away from the law and into the rising sun, you will pass a multiform of street art on the road to the hill that looks out over all of Athens. There is an old man fishing an octopus from the sea, plastered in the annex of a building, and the silhouette of a punk with a black flag on skates greets you as you pass.
Further on, past the little bookshops and the painting store that advertises its wares on the street, colossal artworks of horses and of the sea - for everything of Mediterranean life is connected to the sea - past the nameless squats unknown to the uninitiated, and up several flights of stairs where stray dogs lounge in the heat of summertime, the road is cut short and begins to wrap around the base of a hill. There are several paths on the suddenly green banks bedecked with olive groves and pine trees and such a spattering of colored flowers that makes the hills vibrant with life. Taking any of the paths with put you higher up as they wind together and intersect, calling the hiker towards the apex. Coronating the summit of Mount Lycabettus, rumored to have once housed the wolves, or lycos, of Athens, giving the hill its name, is the chapel of Saint George, austere in the daytime. The myth is that Athena herself carried the hill from the north during the construction of Athens' most famous monument. Acropolis is visible to the south, to the north the mountains, and farther on the Aegean sea. Anyone who passes through Athens should stroll through Exarchia, if just to get a view of the rolling endlessness from the hills.
The view from Lycabettus Hill. Image Credit: Forrest Crellin
You do not need a compass to find Exarchia. There is a magnetic pull, a centralizing force, that wells up out of the square where men seeking refuge light small fires in the winter to keep themselves warm, huddled masses of faces obscured by darkness. The magnetism leads ones footsteps to the square regardless of how far they have traveled, whether it is over the next hill, or whether aboard one of the Blue Star Ferries to go to the islands that dot the Aegean, the home and hearth for Ulysses and Sapho, or on a plane to a foreign land. There is a nagging in the feet that constricts movement and has one forever turning around like the worshipper pointed five times a day to Mecca, head bent for the unseen just over the next horizon.
Every time I would embark, my dog and I, on an aimless trip about the city attempting to get lost in the sprawling urban wilderness that once housed Plato and provided tutelage to Pericles, my feet would always guide me, somehow, to the square filled with wild dogs and transient souls that have been birthed as if from the stones and the statues of the Archeological museum that provides a border to ageless freedom of direct democracy that so clearly dictates the lines separating the people from the rest of Athens.
Once, a few hours into one of those lonely voyages around the city of Athena with golden Phoebus peaking through the tops of the sun-bleached houses, I ran into a friend I had not seen in months and had long thought to have quit the city. We both smiled at each other and shook hands as if it were morning in the bar at the squat we had stayed at, and no time had passed at all, except his curly hair had grown a bit longer and the black sweater was a little more threadbare. After exchanging hellos and asking where he is heading, I realized where I had ended up, and, shocked, I told him I thought I had been lost. “Maybe there is something drawing you here,” he said with a grin.
Even a thousand miles away I can still feel it from time to time, the lodestones in the arches of my feet, tugging incessantly toward the patches of concrete and stone nestled between the bronze flecked hills of time.
A heavy police presence sits outside Exarchia, providing a visual barrier. Image Credit: Forrest Crellin
You will never make friends quite like the people you meet in squat life. There are no pretensions of money, class, or social hierarchy. A man with nothing, clothed and fed through the squat, is treated the same as all else; all are in possession of that one intangible so important in social life, dignity. The broad lights of the squats and the rattle of dice on backgammon boards welcome all. There is no concern about where you’re going or where you come from, and people rarely ask. There is sadness here, but there are also great bursts of laughter that echo down hallways and through staircases. Arrest records, defiance in the face of the state, is unspoken, but worn as a badge of pride, a proof that the lodestones in one’s feet drawing forever to the signal fires that dot the square and sit in the shadow of the temple on the hill have been active within you for some time.
There is also much talk of the ills plaguing the modern Greek. Unemployment is astronomical, and disgust abounds for the government, which capitulated to the austerity demands of the European Union. A good portion of those who live in Exarchia, attend the free classes, and take part in the communal living, are those that have no place in the world to turn to, the refugees fleeing war and persecution. Many have lived in the government-run camps where you get a small container of food a day. Some having been moved all over the small country, from the islands to the north and from the north back down south, separating and reuniting with their families. The stories they tell are impossible to fabricate, that of a young Ulysses trying to find Ithaca.
One woman told of how she was displaced from Afghanistan when the Russians invaded in the 80s, and she lived in Iran for a time, trying to make a life for her and her children. But in Iran, there was no life to be had. She was looked at always as an other. So, when the boats started pushing off for Greece through Turkey, her and her sons, grown now, walked the thousand-kilometer journey over mountain passes and through snow drifts, passing days without food or water, sometimes in scorching heat. They made it to Izmir, where they embarked for the islands, landing in Chios to six months internment in the squalor of the camp on the island, where they were then sent to the north, to Idomeni. The woman was separated from her sons there as they made it back down south. She would say that that was the hardest part of the journey, and her sons, grown men with steel about their eyes, would soften almost imperceptibly in agreement. They reunited after months apart in Athens, where they make their home now in the one place that would take them in and not see it as a chore, but as a space of mutual belonging.
People gather to celebrate Clean Monday. Image Credit: Forrest Crellin
There was a young man from Kurdistan north of Syria, who was used for a year as labor in the factories in Turkey. He said that men would come to the camps offering jobs and people would go, eager to start making a living, eager to escape camp life, eager to feel independent again. But the job held no such luck. He was forced to work 12 to 16-hour days, sleeping at the facilities, barely making more than a lira a day. When he got a chance, he made a break for the coast, running as fast as he could to get to the boats. Now, in Exarchia, he stays in the same squat as his girlfriend and is processing his asylum papers to get citizenship soon. There is still work to do, but it is of the fulfilling kind, no more making shoes and clothing for people will never see his face, or know what happens in the sweatshops in Turkey.
Two men travel through Exarchia, past street art that reads 'dedicated to the poor and homeless here and around the globe'. Image Credit: Forrest Crellin
Even though the idols were all smashed and the ancient temples burned, though we have passed through the age of piety and into the enlightenment, through the restoration and past the days of reason, though we have let the all of the magic in the bronze hills dissipate in dust clouds off the smokestacks and factories lining Homer’s wine dark sea that saw trireme’s push of for Salamis 2500 years ago, though we have butchered the forest and killed the centaur, slaying Artemis and her noble stags, bringing an end to cheerful Pan as revolution followed liberation, you can still hear the twisted cries from the whispering dryad trees that, it is said, once sang by the rivers and now line path along the archeological museum where the trappings of Agamemnon and Euripides lay to rest, standing ordered in a lined grove, trimmed and pruned, where Zeus still rests from time to time as a magpie cawing from the tree tops, and where the figures of the unknown poets that have dotted the centuries and come from Rome and Arcadia and Byzantium, whose names have been lost to time but the fresh fall of there voices still call out from the cobbles and take form in the eyes of the blanketed, huddled tramps, once fleeing the Persians or the Spartans or the Germans or the British, now warming themselves in the doorways, away from the police line and in the streets that still pay homage to Plato, calling their friend and their philosopher home. Apollo and Bacchus can still be found smiling at one another across a smoke-choked bar where the music touches on Greek rap to American classic rock and wraps itself up in the effervescent flow of Kurdish folk. The old gods smile vibrantly on all the travelers that flock in from the world around to find peace in the bosom of the birthplace of Western democracy that has been free and defiant, even through the reign of captors and would be conquerors, since the world was young. Many have tried to tame the land, to bring it to heel, but none have succeeded. The culture, the stories, still call up from Hades and whisper in the ears of those that would listen.
You can see the freedom, the choice of movement and the acceptance of movement, reflected in the eyes of the Greeks and mirrored in the gaze of those that share the streets. There is never a single moment of acceptance. You are welcomed for being there, for following all the ghosts of the centuries to the nexus of the Mediterranean world.
Marble Socrates sits in the shadow of Apollo outside the Greek Parliamentary building. Image Credit: Forrest Crellin
