The Full Catastrophe (28 page)

The Committee of Residents, despite clear ideological commonalities, maintained they had nothing to do with Golden Dawn. (Skordeli, they told me, left their group after joining the party, because that action was incompatible with the committee’s apolitical mission.) The two entities, however, rose in symbiosis as Golden Dawn became known for its efforts to come to the side of the indignant residents and “clean” Agios Panteleimonas Square of the mostly Afghan migrants that daily assembled there by the hundreds. In doing so, the party closely mimicked the tactics of
German neo-Nazis who, in the 1990s, had created “national liberated zones” across the former East Germany, according to the Greek journalist Dimitris Psarras, who has written extensively about the Greek extreme right. The party’s endeavors in Agios Panteleimonas, with the aid of some sympathetic media coverage, won a great deal of approval from a lot of Greeks who, as other parties were passing bills to cut people’s pay, perceived Golden Dawn as acting firmly, albeit perhaps a bit roughly, to help their desperate Greek countrymen.

Golden Dawn’s emergence from a negligible party that won 20,000 votes in the 2009 parliamentary elections, to one that received 440,000 of them and a place in parliament three years later, has often been explained as a manifestation of Greeks’ outrage over the economic collapse and the maladroit governance that spurred it. While Golden Dawn could not have thrived without a source of abundant rage, rage alone provides an insufficient explanation for its ascendance. The party’s performance showed that if it downplayed its Nazism, what remained was an ideology that many regular citizens could embrace. Many Greeks had since their childhoods been inculcated with a sense of Hellenic preeminence—promulgated by their teachers, priests, and politicians—yet also with the belief that Greece has long been victimized and trampled underfoot by foreign powers. At a time of economic collapse and national humiliation, Golden Dawn, with its affirmation of Hellenic supremacy and reproach of foreign oppressors—be they creditors or immigrants—appealed to both the hero and the martyr that had been cultivated in the Greek soul.

Nor were some of its extremist beliefs all that uncommon. Its fervid anti-Semitism, for instance, was by no means unfamiliar or unacceptable; one could hear similar viewpoints uttered by leaders of the Greek Orthodox Church. Far-right nationalist beliefs were already present within the police, the judiciary, and the highest levels of government. Golden Dawn’s leadership knew that many
of its ideas weren’t marginal. It needed only to make itself known and legitimate. For this purpose, the party sensed opportunity in the immigration influx, as did resurgent far-right parties elected into parliaments throughout Europe. But Golden Dawn was far more extreme than most of these, and its electoral success would put it in a worrisome category of its own. Illegal immigration, Golden Dawn said, was the “back door to the castle of Hellenism” and “the most insidious practice against the Greek state.” And so, as it imposed its ethos of violence, it was able to portray itself as acting in defense of the Greek people.

One of the early priorities of the Committee of Residents was to do something about the playground on the square, Giannatou told me when we met at the café. The playground in question was right across from us, its gates wired shut. It had been closed for nearly five years, and the equipment inside was stripped bare and unusable—a swing set with no swings, a jungle gym undressed of bars and ladders. “A lot, a lot,” Giannatou said of the ills the Afghans had brought to the playground. As she spoke, we were joined by another Committee of Residents member, Giannatou’s husband, Spiros Giannatos, a tall, lean man with thinning curly hair and narrow, dark brown eyes. Giannatos had become known as a very active watchman of the square, protecting it from activities he deemed inappropriate. On this afternoon, as Giannatos sat at our table at the café, he announced that he had just seen a young foreign woman taking pictures of the playground. “I ask her, ‘Why are you taking pictures of the playground?’ She says: ‘I’m a tourist.’ ” Giannatos assumed she was a journalist, and it upset him that she would lie. The playground by this point had acquired some fame as a symbol of Golden Dawn’s control over the neighborhood, though the indignant residents disputed that
interpretation of its significance. “I say, ‘You care about the playground? You came from wherever you came from to take pictures of the playground? It concerns you that the playground is closed?’ ” As Giannatos took a seat, the young woman in question nervously walked away from the square with a large camera slung around her neck. “It wasn’t a playground for kids,” Giannatos went on. Hundreds of migrants had taken up residence inside it, he said, sleeping, cooking, bathing, pissing, and defecating within its gates. “There were moms, dads, grandfathers. They were selling heroin.” For these reasons, he said, the Committee of Residents successfully petitioned the city to close it.

While the city had in fact closed the playground, citing the need for its renovation, the chronology of the events leading to this action was a matter of dispute. Members of an area leftist group told me the Committee of Residents—“the fascists,” as the leftists called them—had chained the playground shut in advance of the city’s decision. Litsa Papadopoulou, a thin, chain-smoking pharmacist with short silver hair who drove a four-wheeler around the neighborhood, was a member of the leftist resident group. One morning, I met Papadopoulou at a café on Victoria Square, a five-minute walk from Agios Panteleimonas and the preferred hangout for the area leftists. She and her peers had tried to save Agios Panteleimonas from the fascists by organizing book reading, theater, and music events on the square, she said. The turning point, however, came in the spring of 2009, on the evening they invited the well-known Albanian writer Gazmend Kapllani to visit the square for a reading of his book about Albanian migration to Greece after the fall of the Iron Curtain. By the time Kapllani arrived, a group of indignant residents had gathered to protest the reading. One woman walked around with a megaphone, accusing the event organizers of being the “henchmen of the system.” One of the alleged henchmen spoke calmly through his megaphone in response: “We don’t want to scold or argue with
anyone, with any resident of the area. We don’t want immigrants and Greek residents of the neighborhood to argue. We want to live all together.” The indignant residents were not convinced by these words, Kapllani told me years later over the phone from Boston, where he was teaching a course at Emerson College. The indignant residents and some thuggish-looking young men became aggressive and overthrew a table, Kapllani said. He also found it noteworthy, he added, that some of the assailants started chanting: “We fucked you during the civil war, we’ll fuck you again.” Feeling threatened, he and the organizers fled the square, he said.

Spiros Giannatos of the Committee of Residents also remembered that evening. “They come to present a book where we are enduring woe?” he told me. “Is that even possible? In an area that is boiling from indignation due to what we have to live through every day? For them to bring us an Albanian here in Agios Panteleimonas? Have mercy!” His wife, probably noticing my bafflement, tried to help me understand: “We couldn’t bear this drowning of illegal immigration.” An extreme-right, Golden Dawn–friendly newspaper called
Stochos
concurred with this sentiment. The night of the attempted book reading, it published on its website the news that indignant residents were able to break up the “anti-Greek gathering, which we all knew to where it would lead.” The “counterattack of the residents was terminative,” it added. “The river of indignation swells and will lure many. The lies, ladies and gentlemen, are over. THIS IS GREECE. And whoever doesn’t like it, GET OUT.”

Members of the leftist residents’ group told me this event marked the fascist takeover of Agios Panteleimonas Square. After that, they found the playground padlocked shut. Some pointed the finger at Giannatos, though he denied locking it, maintaining that the city closed it at his committee’s urging. One person who took credit for the playground closing, however, was the self-proclaimed “section manager” of Agios Panteleimonas for Golden
Dawn, Georgios Vathis, a man who could frequently be found at a café on the square wearing a fedora and a suit with white shoes, puffing his cigarettes through a filter tip. Vathis, appearing in a 2012 documentary called
The Cleaners
by the Greek filmmaker Konstantinos Georgousis, stood in front of the Agios Panteleimonas church and declared the square had been liberated. “A Greek can come with his child and sit,” he said. “We’ve closed the playground.” Vathis explained that it was full of foreigners. “The soil and everything has to be replaced because of the filth,” he said. “If you touch something in there, you’ll get a rash. That much filth. From the foreign people,” he said. “We kicked them out, and it’s a bit cleaner. But it’s not that clean. We have to chase them all the time.” Vathis is seen in the film campaigning with Alexandros Plomaritis, a then Golden Dawn candidate with a buzz cut and an affection for aviator sunglasses. Plomaritis, in the film, calls immigrants “primitive, miasmas and subhuman,” suggests their babies be “thrown to the Dobermans,” and says he is “ready to open up the ovens” and turn foreigners into soap. His buddies in the film laugh as he says this.

The documentary got a lot of attention in Greece and abroad, though when I mentioned it to Giannatou on the square, she told me people had made a big deal out of it. They were just kidding around, she said of the people in the film. “A joke and they made it into a big issue.” At one point, I showed Giannatou and her husband a letter to the city from the leftist residents’ group that described the playground as having been in “excellent condition” before it was closed. This was a lie, Giannatou told me. She emphasized once again the unsanitariness of the playground. The committee had sent a sample of the playground dirt to a government lab, she said, where it was discovered that it contained staphylococcus. “For someone to reenter the playground, the soil must be replaced at a depth of ten meters due to the germs that are in there,” she said. This sounded oddly familiar, I thought. Her husband added, “They had turned the playground into a toilet.”

Father Prokopios, the former head priest of Agios Panteleimonas church, doesn’t remember the playground this way. Then again, Prokopios didn’t usually see eye to eye with the Committe of Residents. He led the church for seventeen years, and left it in 2009 after being promoted to assistant bishop. “My soul is still there,” he told me when I met him one evening in his office on the ground floor of a dormitory for theological students in a working-class neighborhood of Athens north of Agios Panteleimonas. Prokopios was a dark-eyed, bespectacled man in his fifties. His face seemed nearly consumed by a thicket of gray beard that extended to his waistline. A large crucifix stood in one corner of his office beside a blinking WiFi router mounted to the wall. Plastic flowers in vases and framed pictures of his parents lined the bookshelves. This had been his office for nearly two decades, and the place seemed like it hadn’t changed much in that time. That evening, an old woman named Maria was visiting. She used to live near Agios Panteleimonas church and had volunteered there during Prokopios’s reign. She wore a trench coat that had the effect of elongating her hunched body, though her feet barely touched the floor when she sat down. She was very old, but giggled like a teenager when Prokopios told a good story, for which he had a knack. She had moved away from Agios Panteleimonas, she told me, to assuage her kids, who, given the changes to the neighborhood, were afraid to leave her by herself in the family home where they grew up. She seemed ambivalent about the change, and visiting Prokopios appeared to be a way to reminisce about happier times.

Prokopios started the conversation by speaking about the incompatibility of Greece’s recent immigrants with Greek society. What does a Greek have in common with “the other who lives next door to you when he is black from Africa, or Pakistani, and has his Muslim customs, and he doesn’t say
kalimera
,” or good
day, “he doesn’t learn your language, he doesn’t accept that which you, in your country, take as self-evident—that Greece is Orthodox?” he said. Maria nodded in agreement. I had expected to hear a different line of argument from Prokopios, because, during his later years at Agios Panteleimonas, he had acquired a reputation as having treated the migrants in the neighborhood with compassion. After a few minutes, though, he pivoted. “We had to think something else, too,” he said. “Okay, we’re also people of God. We are Christians. We need to see people humanely, from the humane side. We can’t just look at them like Greeks, but we have to look at them like people. If the other guy is hungry or suffering, you’re not going to think about whether he’s an immigrant, an illegal immigrant, a foreigner, or a Greek. He’s hungry, and you have to do something to help him to eat,” he said. “So, that was the problem. We thought we have to think first like Christians, and afterward to think like Greeks. But there was a very big group of people who thought the opposite. First they thought like Greeks, and not at all like Christians.”

One evening, Prokopios recalled, Themis Skordeli, the Committee of Residents member who later became a Golden Dawn candidate, came to church while he was hearing confessions and told him a committee had been formed. They had drafted a letter and were “gathering signatures to throw the immigrants out of the area,” as Prokopios put it. She wanted him to sign and include the stamp of the church, Prokopios said. He refused, saying he did not have the authority to use the church stamp as he pleased. Nor would he sign as an individual. “I have an order from Christ to not kick any person out, not to be an enemy with anyone. Christ says to love one another. But he goes further and says, love your enemies. If you tell me that person is an enemy, I love him,” he said he told Skordeli. She was apparently not persuaded. “From that day on,” Prokopios told me, “a war against me began.”