Downtown Athens Seems to Be On Fire

The nightly news seems to be telling me that downtown Athens is on fire. I can only understand some of the Greek words the silver-haired anchorman is saying, but the pictures speak quite clearly. Molotov cocktails thrown at police. Clouds of tear gas filling the streets. Angry young anarchists burning the Greek flag.

Needless to say, I find this fairly troubling. The quiet suburb where I live and the campus of the school where I teach seem very far removed from all this turmoil. So I guess I'm disturbed on two levels. First, I wouldn't want my house and workplace to be either lit on fire or tear-gassed. But I also feel weird about being so removed from the major events of the city I live in.

That's how I ended up timidly popping my head out of the Metro station next to Athens University, ground zero for the protests. Since the scene was clear of both fire and tear gas for the moment, I took a walk around. Several things surprised me. First of all, lots of middle-aged businesspeople seemed to be going about their daily commute unfazed. Not exactly what I pictured from the news reports.

That's not to say there weren't police. There were police, lots of them. They were standing shoulder-to-shoulder along both sides of the main avenue. All were in riot gear, some seemed to be wearing additional hockey pads on their wrists and elbows. In between the lines of riot police, young people were chanting and waving flags with the anarchist "A." I ran into Maria, a Greek woman who works at a cafe I often go to, also observing the demonstration. 

"I think maybe we should go." Maria said, "This could be danger."

The current unrest in Athens marks the one-year anniversary of the shooting of a teenaged boy by a police officer. Last December 6, there were riots in the streets that lasted for weeks. This year, police have vowed not to allow protesters to run wild. While the protests are nominally about the anniversary of the shooting, from the outside it's hard to see what concrete action or concession the protesters are hoping for. The new government has already denounced the killing. The police officer who fired the bullet is on trial. The Molotov cocktails seem to be more about pure rage than any agenda.

I bring this point up with Martin, a fellow American who's been living in Greece for years. "It's true," he says. "From an American perspective, it's scary that there's this kind of violence." But Martin says this violence is also a reflection of how unacceptable Greek society views the boy's killing. Personally, I don't know what to think. So I head back up to my suburb to watch the news.