I walked through the Parartima hallway escorted by one of the guards. I wiped my eyes – they must have been puffy and red but I didn’t let a tear run down my face. Some inmates moved to the left of the hallway to make way for us; some to the right. They watched in amazement as I walked past them like I was on death row walking the mile again. I was liked by many of the inmates in Parartima – a few of them made eye contact and softly nodded. It was their way of saying goodbye, good luck, you can do it, and acknowledging that the transfer was a complete malakia. I stood in the office for the last time. ‘Why are you doing this?’ I cried.
‘Skotoses enan anthropo, kai rotas yiati? – You killed a man, and you ask why?’ said the Archi Fylakas.
‘I didn’t kill anyone.’
‘Milame Ellinika! – We speak Greek!’ he bellowed, thumping his fist on his desk.
‘Are you a judge?’ I asked him.
He ignored me. I turned to Dimos – a prison guard who looked like Vin Diesel and had always been kind to me. After visits from my family he would often tell me that he thought my parents were very nice people. His face was serious, but his eyes told me that he knew it shouldn’t be happening. ‘Just let me stay. Please.’
He looked away, powerless.
‘But I go to the school!’ I argued.
The Archi Fylakas ignored me. I was escorted to the front of the complex where two police officers handcuffed me from behind and sat me in the back seat of a police car.
* * *
PART III
* * *
I learned that courage was not the absence of fear, but the triumph over it. The brave man is not he who does not feel afraid, but he who conquers that fear.
– Nelson Mandela
2 December 2009, BBC News
UK MAN IN ‘INFAMOUS’ GREEK PRISON
Campaigners say they have ‘grave concerns’ after a north London student on remand in Greece was moved to an ‘infamous’ maximum-security prison.
Andrew Symeou, 21, is charged with the manslaughter of Jonathan Hiles, 18, of Cardiff, who died on the isle of Zante in 2007, allegedly after being punched.
Mr Symeou, of Enfield, has been moved to Korydallos Prison in Athens, a jail condemned by Amnesty International.
Fair Trials International said it was ‘horrified’ at the move.
Mr Hiles, who was in Britain’s roller-hockey team, died in July 2007 two days after falling off a dance podium in a nightclub.
Bournemouth University student Mr Symeou has denied killing him, saying that he was not in the club at the time.
He was extradited to Greece in July after losing a High Court battle and has been denied bail.
Mr Symeou was held at a detention centre for young people north of Athens until he was transferred to Korydallos Prison on Wednesday.
Fair Trials International Chief Executive Jago Russell said, ‘Andrew, who was informed of the transfer only five minutes before he had to leave, is reportedly highly distraught.
‘He has already been in jail for four months with no opportunity to clear his name.
‘We are horrified that this young man has today been transferred to this infamous prison, and have grave concerns for his welfare.’
Human rights group Amnesty International and the European Committee for the Prevention of Torture have repeatedly expressed concern about Korydallos Prison.
Amnesty said inmates faced degrading treatment including poor hygiene in cells and a lack of fresh air, exercise facilities or prompt medical treatment.
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* * *
STARRED UP
* * *
2 December 2009, Korydallos Prison, Piraeus
An Australian/Greek admin worker in the Korydallos Prison office took my photograph while I stood anxious and intimidated. I was allocated to the Gamma wing. ‘You have nothing to worry about,’ he said. The words didn’t comfort me because I knew that they weren’t true. I felt a constant falling sensation, like I was plummeting down a bottomless hole. However awful I felt, I had no choice but to hide my numbing fear with a sombre face and confident demeanour. I had to be as strong as possible; I couldn’t show weakness.
The complex was a maze of corridors and I was expected to find Gamma by myself. My mind felt compelled to wander again and a silly thought suddenly entered my head: I could have blagged my way as an assistant psychologist interning from London and walked right out the front door. I started to reason with myself, as though I was seriously considering it. First, I was wearing tracksuit bottoms and Adidas trainers; for it to be believable I would have needed to find a psychologist and rob him of his clothes. Secondly, I was pretty fat at the time, so it would have had to be a fat psychologist that I robbed, otherwise his clothes wouldn’t have fitted me. Thirdly, even if I had walked out, I wouldn’t have been a free man. There was no escaping – even when using my wildest, stupidest imagination. I had no choice but to face it.
I stepped into Gamma wing and was immediately confronted by the echoing hum of wolf-whistles and men shouting. It was absolutely chaotic and I was instantly filled with fear. It wasn’t like Avlona’s Parartima (as Arnas had assumed it would be); hundreds of inmates roamed the wing and it was far larger, much more unhygienic and daunting. A soaring ceiling covered a barred jungle of three-tiered levels, which hosted around 120 solid steel cell doors – each coated in dull orange paint. The ground floor was a wide, elongated hallway that was home to a number of dirty stray cats as well as many criminals. With broad, open-barred windows at the very end of the wing, pigeons made their way inside and perched on ceiling fans that no longer worked. The result was that the floor had blotches of bird and cat faeces scattered all around.
There were several men standing on the middle and top floors who leaned against the chest-high barriers. The barriers were made of steel bars, thickly covered with lumpy off-white paint – but were stained a nicotine yellow, chipped and rusting. The men watched over the ground floor as though they were standing on balconies; they could have been propelled over the side and fallen to their deaths at any moment. There were no safety barriers and it was extremely dangerous.
At the front of the wing was a staircase connecting each floor, which was open for inmates to walk freely on any level of the prison wing. Inmates were hanging around on the steps in groups – a threat to new inmates who needed to walk up or down the stairs. On the ground floor near the bottom of the staircase was a prison guard sitting at a desk.
With a plastic bin bag full of clothes in my hand, and my Nike sports bag over my shoulder, I looked down at the ypallilos, who was gazing back like a hawk.
‘Ti? – What?’ he said.
I rolled my eyes. ‘I’m here to go to prison?’
‘Epitheton? – Surname?’
‘Symeou.’
He shuffled around some papers on the desk in front of him. ‘Saranta ennea – forty-nine.’
‘Where is it?’
‘Proto orofo, aristera kai sti mesi – First floor, on the left and in the middle,’ he replied, pointing me in the correct direction without moving his eyes from the document in front of him.
My trembling nerves started to heighten. If it wasn’t for my four months in Avlona I would have found it far more difficult to cope. I’d experienced entering a new prison before, and Avlona was a huge stepping-stone. Nevertheless, I could almost hear my own heartbeat increasing in speed – I was absolutely shitting myself. I took a breath and walked up the staircase, making sure that I didn’t make eye contact with any inmates. I could hear different languages – what could have been Albanian and fast blurts of Arabic. My peripheral vision saw a group of inmates sitting on the stairs, but I didn’t look at them. I looked forward and didn’t move my head. Some were smoking and staring at me with curious eyes. A bulky man wearing a bandana hurried down the staircase, like an antelope running from a lion. He barged me as he passed and I almost toppled over. There was a hand on my shoulder behind me – I was startled, but the hand also stoppe
d me from falling backwards down the stairs. I turned my head to the side and recognised the face. It was Leonarde from Patras Police Station, from before I was taken to Avlona (one of the Romanian guys who I’d shared a holding cell with for four days).
‘You remember me?’ he said, smiling.
I shook his hand in shock, as I expected never to see him again. ‘Course I remember you, where’s your brother and Remos?’
‘Constantin is here.’ Leonarde pointed to the bottom of the stairs where I could see his brother waving.
I gave him a subtle wave back. ‘And how about Remos?’
‘He’s in Epsilon sector. But you will see him; he works in the kitchen and serves the food in Gamma sometimes.’
‘And how is it here?’ I asked.
He grinned. ‘My friend. This is a hotel, didn’t you know?’
‘What time is check out?’
‘You can check out if you don’t hang yourself first,’ he replied.
I ignored the comment. ‘Forty nine … you know who’s in that cell!?’
‘I don’t think so. Come, this way,’ he said.
I followed him up the stairs onto the middle floor, noticing that he strolled around like he owned the place. He turned his head towards me as we walked. ‘I promise, you don’t want to be living with the Tsingani’ – Romany gypsies who are renowned for thieving in prison.
Looking around the Gamma wing I could already see that inmates generally stuck to their own kind. There were racial gangs, mainly of Romany gypsies, Albanians, Russians, Pakistanis, Africans, Greeks and even some Chinese.
‘Here it is,’ Leonarde said. He thumped his fist on the metal door, then pulled it open and peeked his head into cell forty-nine. ‘Ehete ena kainourgio, kalo paidi – You have a new one, good kid,’ Leonarde said to my new cellmates. I couldn’t see who was inside the cell because the door was obstructing my vision. Leonarde quickly whispered something to me. ‘You’re lucky, they are Ellines – Greeks.’
I walked around the door and into the cell where two men were sitting inside. It was half the size of Avlona’s cells; absolutely tiny. Two metal-framed bunk beds met to make an ‘L’ shape, but there was no gap between them like there was in Avlona. There was a small, rectangular, barred window at the other end of the cell, which sat above one of the top bunks. Just to the right of the cell door was a floor-level toilet, leaving the cell with the potent stench of sewage. To make it worse, there was only a thin half-wall to separate it from the rest of the cell. On the other side of the thin wall was a sink and a small plastic garden table and chair, which left only very little walking space. At the top of the right wall was a long fluorescent tube light fitting with a plastic diffuser. Underneath the diffuser must have been hundreds of little cockroaches crawling around – I started to notice that the cell was infested. I cringed when I spotted little cockroaches on the walls, around the toilet and even on the cell door. It was difficult to believe that four fully grown men were expected to live in such a small, insect-infested cell. It was inhumane. The cell was too small for even two people to live in.
‘Ti krevati? – Which bed?’ I mumbled to one of the men.
He pointed to the bottom bunk that was free, adjacent to the cell door against the left wall. There was a muscular bald man with a goatee sitting on my bunk and playing with a kombolloi – beads threaded on a looped piece of string – similar to a pegleri. I pushed my bags underneath the bunk. The other man was sitting at the table and peeling potatoes with a prison-made blade. I have no idea what it was made out of, but it could easily have slit a throat.
‘Come, let’s go for a volta – stroll,’ said Leonarde. We walked down to the ground floor and wandered from one end of the wing to the other – back and forth at a gentle pace. My temples pounded, but I managed to prevent myself from bursting into hysteria. Instead I put on a cool façade, covering the unbearable tension inside of me; I think that I was even smiling sometimes. I remember trying not to look anyone in the eyes and feeling jittery, but walking with Leonarde was the best way to ease into my surroundings.
There were plastic garden chairs and tables outside several cells. I could hear the knocking sounds of inmates throwing dice onto wooden tavli – backgammon boards. Some inmates were playing skaki – chess, and smoking or drinking frappes.
Two Chinese inmates were sitting behind a table outside of their cell and had created their own prison market stall. They’d handcrafted wooden objects out of kebab skewers and were selling them; their main products were cases for small disposable Bic cigarette lighters. The cases had been beautifully crafted, carefully glued together, filed down and varnished, giving the impression that they had been professionally manufactured in solid wood. Each of them exhibited a different painted design. Some were basic with black writing in different languages; others were coated with colourful religious icons, or pictures of things like dragons, cannabis leaves or naked women. There were a couple of full-sized backgammon boards for sale, which were also made entirely out of wooden skewers. It must have taken them months to make because the boards hadn’t even been painted. They’d used a hot pan to burn thousands of skewers, so they had an entire spectrum of brown shades. The dark triangular markings on the face of the board were made from skewers of different lengths, which had been fried to a dark brown shade. Having been carefully filed down and varnished, the backgammon boards were left with a unique, striped texture and glow – but when you looked closely at the edges, you could see that it was made out of thousands of wooden sticks. I found it incredible and it reminded me of Christos in Avlona. With his ingenuity and their application, imagine what they could have made together.
‘You know, I’m only walking with you so that people here can see you’re with someone,’ Leonarde revealed.
‘Thanks.’
‘Yeah, no problem.’
‘When’s your court?’ I asked.
‘I’m still waiting.’
‘Yeah, me too. What kind of fucked-up system is this?’
‘You will be here a lot longer than me. I’m here for a money crime, you’re here for murder.’
The words were painful to my ears – sometimes I forgot why I was even there in the first place. Only hours earlier I was in cell one in Parartima, writing a letter to Riya. I was still in shock from the speedy transfer and desperately needed to think positively. I wouldn’t be able to cope for the first few days if I were to get caught up in another negative spiral of my own fears and anxieties. Although Leonarde was trying to help me, comments like that didn’t help at all. Positivity was the key, because the thought of possibly being locked-up for twenty years was a niggling thought that had been eating away at me for ages. Korydallos Prison was hell on earth, and I was paying for someone else’s crime.
I returned to cell forty-nine and one of my new cellmates handed me a plastic container. ‘Fayito? – Food?’ he asked. I copied him and took a food coupon out of an empty cigarette box that had been glued to the wall, to the left of the cell door. Earlier in the day, an inmate worker would poke his head into the cell and place the coupons in there, like a prison postman.
From the first-floor hallway I could see a crowd of inmates forming at the front of the wing, next to the stairs on the ground floor. I made my way to the back of the herd, where inmates began to push past each other like rugby players, desperate to make their way to the front. Within seconds I found myself in the centre of a smelly scrum of prisoners, being continuously pushed to the back like a malakas. The only way to make it to the front was to shove myself through them all and fight for my food, but I was too nervous to do that. A punch-up between two inmates kicked off and one fell to the floor – others kicked him as he screamed. It all happened so quickly – I gazed in surprise as the only ypallilos supervising the Gamma wing took a step back and waited for it to end. Was it going to be this dangerous, every day, just to eat? How could I possibly cope? I was exhausted just witnessing it. It was unfortunate that my first experience of queu
ing for food in Gamma was more dramatic than your typical day.
Inmates from other prison wings served the food out of huge metal cauldrons. Once the madness had finally died down, the injured inmate was carried out of the wing by a guard and another inmate. I’d made it to the front; the inmate serving the food scraped out the last scoop of kritharaki me kreas – barley pasta with meat, and let it drool into my plastic container. The lumps of lamb were all chewy fat, which floated in an artery-clogging river of red oil – I didn’t even want to think about what else was in it. I took the food back to the cell, unable to bring myself to eat it. I was drained, nauseous, dizzy and powerless to calm the quivering in my chest. Going through the disturbing experience of collecting the prison food on my first day in Gamma wasn’t worth the hassle. Just before lock-in, one of my cellmates took the leftovers to the ground-level hallway and splattered all of it onto the centre of the floor. Several other inmates would do the same. The middle of the wing would be covered in leftover food and families of stray cats would feast.
It was the first time that I’d had the chance to become properly acquainted with my cellmates. Stelios was a chain-smoker and frappe-drinker – a small, skinny man in his forties who looked a little bit like a Greek Robert Carlyle, although he was shorter and sweaty, with thinning hair. He was wearing a bright red McDonald’s T-shirt, exhibiting the famous golden arches. But instead of displaying the fast-food franchise’s well-known slogan ‘I’m lovin’ it’, the T-shirt said ‘I’m smokin’ it’, and had a picture of a cannabis leaf in the background. I think he had a mild form of Tourette syndrome, because he would often blurt out random meaningless syllables for no apparent reason, like ‘pou le le le le!’ He spoke no English, only quick blurts of short Greek sentences. I could just about understand his story – he told me that he absolutely loved smoking weed and grew it on his farm in Rhodes. His whole family smoked weed – it sounded like his wife and kids were always stoned while he was out almost every night having sex with poutanes – prostitutes. He was in prison because one of his neighbours had stolen a few kilos of his hashish, so he chased him through the village with a shotgun and shot him in the thigh.
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