Greeks are still reeling from heavy pension cuts, tax hikes and troubling levels of unemployment, (which at 20 percent remain the highest in the Eurozone despite having dropped in recent years). Years and years of crippling austerity measures have shrunk Greece’s economy by a quarter, prompting hundreds of thousands of young people to emigrate and pushing nearly half the country’s elderly below the poverty line.3
If that’s a “success story,” what would a failure look like?
A University of Washington study funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation found that “from 2010 to 2016, Greece was faced with a five-times greater rate of annual all-cause mortality increase and a more modest increase in non-fatal health loss compared with pre-austerity.”4 This includes deaths due to suicide, depression, and alcohol and drug abuse, all part of what happens when a population finds their livelihood, security, and dignity stripped from them by a corrupt banking system. A five times greater rate of death—can you imagine? That’s a humanitarian crisis, not a debt-repayment program. Which makes the moralizing of European bureaucrats especially odious.
The crisis is typically framed as if the Greeks brought it upon themselves. Former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis defined “austerity” in his book Adults in the Room: “Austerity is a morality play pressed into the service of legitimizing cynical wealth transfers from the have-nots to the haves during times of crisis, in which debtors are sinners who must be made to pay for their misdeeds.”5
Like lots of cities that emerge from hardship—Barcelona after Franco, Berlin after the fall of the wall—sometimes you get a burst of creative energy. When society receives a shock, when your hopes and dreams and plans get fucked over by a situation out of your control, then it’s time to make new ones. As boxer Mike Tyson so eloquently said, “Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.” Sometimes the only reasonable response is to pack up and go. Beginning in 2010, almost half a million young Greeks immigrated to other coun tries. An article in the Financial Times in 2018 stated that more than two-thirds of the émigrés were university graduates or people with postgraduate degrees.6 It was an epic brain drain, with tens of thousands of doctors and engineers leaving for European Union countries like the Netherlands, Belgium, and Germany. At one point the Australian embassy held a job fair to entice highly educated Greeks to move down under. For the ones who stayed, many of the available jobs were in the service and tourism industries.
All this is nothing new for Athenians. The city was sacked by the Persians in 480 BCE, besieged by the Macedonians and a couple of Roman armies over the next hundred or so years, sacked again by Germanic barbarians in 267 CE, and then overrun by the Ottomans. Austerity is just another kind of siege by barbarians from the north.
Artemis in Exarchia (photograph courtesy of the author).
The Exarchia neighborhood near the University of Athens probably best represents the dynamics of the current crisis. In 2008 an argument between two police officers and a group of teenagers resulted in one of the policemen shooting and killing a fifteen-year-old student named Alexander Grigoropoulos. This incident lit the fuse of pent-up frustration caused by the financial crisis and the imposition of austerity. Exarchia exploded. As you might expect when you have an entire population who feel they’re being fucked over, protests, rioting, and running street battles with the police ensued. Demonstrations against austerity popped up in other cities and there was a general sense of unrest throughout Greece.
Talking to people about it reminds me of my experiences during the Brixton riots of 1981, the Los Angeles uprising of 1992,* and the Black Lives Matter protests that took place all across the United States in the summer of 2020, when the hopeful energy of standing up for justice is met with the fear that the police will use increasingly violent measures to restore the status quo. Typically that’s what happens. The police crack down, the media stop covering it, the anger fizzles out or is directed elsewhere, and nothing much changes. Just look at the lip service politicians paid to Black Lives Matter protesters. They said all the right things—maybe they even meant it when they said it—but when the legislation is ultimately enacted, it’s weak sauce, diluted by the police union and other special interests until it is basically the same thing as before, except the police aren’t allowed to choke you to death. People are resistant to change, the status quo does not want to be moved. It takes a change of consciousness to change the way things exist, and even then it’s never easy.
It didn’t happen that way in Exarchia. Not exactly. On my first visit to the neighborhood in 2016, I was struck by the multiple police checkpoints I passed on my way in. Once I was inside, there were no police to be seen along the quiet, tree-lined streets or in any of the tavernas that line the pleasant square. Aside from the husk of a burned-out automobile and some broken glass, there were no signs of any uprising, no whiff of tear gas; the whole place was pretty chill. Which makes sense, because from the students’ point of view, the police were forced out; from the cops’ point of view, the anarchists and troublemakers were kept in. If a demonstration tried to burst out of the confines of the neighborhood, there were squads of riot police waiting.
For the last ten years or so a kind of equilibrium had been achieved, a working standoff that suited both sides. And in a refreshing change from what typically happens in the United States when police kill an unarmed man, the Greek policeman was sentenced to life in prison for “homicide with direct intention to cause harm.”
In many ways Exarchia is like any neighborhood around a major university: there are bars and head shops, coffee shops and tavernas, bookstores, guitar stores, boutiques selling vintage clothing, and the best-named record store in the world, Bowel of Noise. And like Metaxourgeio, every surface is covered by street art—some of it breathtakingly beautiful, much of it political. Slapped next to the art are thick layers of posters for rock shows, plays, demonstrations, lectures, and protests of all kinds. It is layers of information and images, built up for years, strata of protest and outrage, community organizing and anarchy. Some people say it’s “visual noise” or “eye pollution,” and I will be the first to admit that when “Sleepy” and “Stonker” tag the wall of my house in Los Angeles, I’m not happy about it, but those are gang tags, teenagers trying to claim some street cred. I know I sound like a hypocrite, but it’s different in Athens. It’s not about claiming territory, it is public discourse through art, a return to the beginnings of democracy, in a city where citizens have publicly voiced their thoughts and feelings for thousands of years.
The graffiti and art are all over the university, which surprised me. And when I told an Athenian friend this would never happen at an American campus, he was shocked. He said, “It’s a public space. The people own the walls and should be allowed to express themselves.”
Antifa in Exarchia (photograph courtesy of the author).
From my tourist point of view, I feel an undeniable energy in the streets of Metaxourgeio and Exarchia, something that portends a shift in fortunes for Athens. But maybe that’s just me. I asked urban geographer and longtime Exarchia resident George Papamattheakis what he thought about the current situation. George is a student at the Harokopio University of Athens, where he’s working on a postgraduate degree in applied social geography. He has also studied in Moscow, at the Strelka Institute for Media, Architecture and Design. George is one of those guys who seems to know everyone, at least everyone in his neighborhood. Perhaps that’s because he’s good-looking and friendly, or maybe because he rocks one of the best mustaches this side of Freddie Mercury.
George and his girlfriend, Jenny, agreed to meet Diana and me at Seychelles, an excellent bistro in Metaxourgeio. They were leaving the next morning for their summer vacation, and Jenny brought her fully loaded backpack into the restaurant as if she were preparing to camp out. Now that I think of it, that’s not a bad idea. The restaurant is fantastic. Why leave?
We talked a lot that night—mostly about the delicious win
e, a Xinomavro rosé, and their impending trip to Naxos—but also about what was happening in the city. I told George that the U.S. embassy in Athens had issued a warning about Exarchia. Americans were advised to avoid it.
George rubbed his eyes. “I didn’t know that.”
I laughed. “It’s probably why I like the place. What would you say to someone who is considering going to Exarchia?”
“Exarchia is being depicted in the media as the ghetto of Athens, so maybe this is why the American embassy put out this warning. In my opinion, it’s nothing like that. I would say that it’s an open neighborhood. Up until last year, I would also say that it’s safe. I would never advise people not to walk here at night. On the contrary, people coming here to settle as students, even younger girls, I would say that there’s no problem in you walking around late at night, coming back home, all of these things. But there is—in the past year, especially, there has been a surge in microcriminality, like thefts, things like that.”
I have never heard the expression “microcriminality,” but having lost my sunglasses to a pickpocket in Monastiraki Square, I can attest to how annoying it can be. Yet it might be a small indignity to suffer if it meant that you could be free of police harassment, especially for refugees and people of color. Or perhaps I’m just projecting the abysmal state of policing currently on display in the United States. There’s a reason there’s a movement toward defunding or reallocating police budgets by groups like Black Lives Matter. When the police no longer serve the community that pays their salaries, does it make sense to have a police department? I’m curious, because I think it might be an answer to a host of problems. I asked George, “What’s it like to live in an area without police? How is the neighborhood organized?”
“Well, it’s technically still under the municipality, right? So it’s not self-organized at the neighborhood level. There is some kind of assembly of people, but this doesn’t really have authority. They’re just organizing public events, some green markets, things like that. But there are different kinds of collectives running in Exarchia. Some of them are very straightforwardly political, like the anarchists, or the autonomists, or the communist anarchy, so they have some very specific direction. For example, the other well-known assembly, which is Rouvikonas, is an anarchist collective that have a very specific political direction that they are pursuing.”
Which, when you think about it, is totally in keeping with how early Athenians developed democracy. People got together and discussed ways of organizing the city and living their lives. That doesn’t mean there wasn’t a version of law enforcement in ancient Athens; the Scythian archers* performed that duty, patrolling the streets and arresting people whom the council deemed worthy of detention. And not everyone is happy with Exarchia’s experiment in self-governance. In the summer of 2019, a new and conservative mayor, Kostas Bakoyannis, a member of the center-right New Democracy party, took office and vowed to “reclaim Exarchia.”
George sighed. “It’s part of this whole ghetto narrative, how we’re going to clean up Exarchia, how we’re going to make Exarchia safer. And then open up a new metro station right in the square of Exarchia. At the same time, a lot of investors from abroad are buying property in Athens, especially Chinese capital investors, who are buying a lot of real estate in Exarchia.”
Back in Metaxourgeio, I sat on the balcony of the Amazonon Street apartment in the shade of a tree. More than thirty feet tall, the tree rose out of the sidewalk and provided a canopy over the balcony. It was like having a tree house connected to the apartment. I could sit out there, drink a glass of wine, and eat olives as the sounds of the neighborhood filtered in: the dull thud of techno coming from the top of the block, the clatter of dishes in a taverna at the other end, the buzz of Vespas, the murmur of conversation. The sun might be hot, but the tree provided shade. It was, as you might imagine, very pleasant. It was easy to see why Epicurus built his garden nearby.
In the Athens of Ariphrades’s time, Metaxourgeio would’ve been olive groves or small farms. Students on their way to Plato’s Academy would exit through the Dipylon gate in the Kerameikos and walk along a road that passed through the cemetery outside the city walls, an area lined with statuary tributes to fallen war heroes, beloved spouses, and important citizens. You can still see the remnants of this in the Kerameikos museum, a large open area littered with grandiose funerary monuments and the ruins of the ancient city walls. That road cut through the heart of where I was now sitting. I wish I could say that I heard ancient voices or felt some kind of ethereal presence in the streets of Metaxourgeio, but that wouldn’t be true. Maybe it’s too old; maybe the spirits have moved on. But people have been walking past this spot for thousands of years, talking about the weather, food, sex, war, philosophy—whatever was on their minds, all the things we talk about today; they gossiped, they had heart-to-hearts, they made jokes.
Humor was an important part of their lives, and the ancient comic playwrights and poets had the license to be funny, to mock and satirize, to point out the absurd, to take the trials and tribulations and suffering of life and use it as grist for a laugh. It was the news and editorial pages of the day, the writers responding to current events, commenting on them, and influencing public opinion. The jokes weren’t meant to last millennia; they were ephemeral, the hot takes of their day.
I feel real gratitude for those scribes and for the continuum of irreverent writers and comedic comrades in arms who followed them. Musicians always talk about how the Beach Boys influenced the Beatles, who in turn influenced the Beach Boys, or the bluesmen who influenced the Rolling Stones, who then influenced the Clash, who influenced the Pixies, and so on. That kind of influence exists with writers too. We’re predominantly readers, so what we read affects what and how we write. Aristophanes and other Greek satirists influenced Roman writers like Lucian and Martial, who inspired Molière, who influenced Joe Orton, who influenced Larry David, who influenced Abbi Jacobson and Ilana Glazer. It’s the same with fiction and nonfiction, and it’s especially true for people writing with humorous intent. You can draw a line from Mary Roach and Marian Keyes, David Sedaris and Paul Beatty, through Kingsley Amis and Graham Greene, Machado de Assis and Laurence Sterne, all the way back to the Greeks. Writing is an ongoing conversation between writers running all the way back to ancient Athens. It may not look like there’s a direct connection, but you can feel it, especially when you read the work of ancient Athenian writers; they don’t seem that distant.
Maybe it was the wine and the sharp Athens sunlight filtering through the tree, but out on that balcony I felt like I was a part of the conversation. I’m not saying that my work is at the same level as those people—many of whom I consider geniuses—and there are lots of names I’ve left out; but I feel lucky to be a tiny part of it.* Somehow being in Athens made me feel connected.
Becoming a writer was not something I planned. Like almost everything I’ve done, for better or worse, I fell into it. I can’t even say I’m self-taught; I learned by reading—as much and as widely as I possibly could—and scribbling weird ideas for my own amusement. I did take a creative writing class once, in my freshman year of college. I don’t remember much about it. I definitely don’t remember any of the notes the professor might’ve given about the Richard Brautigan–influenced drivel I was churning out at the time. But I distinctly remember going to the typewriter room at the library and typing a story onto special mimeograph paper so that it could be copied and handed out to the class. And I’ll never forget a student in the class who wrote erotica, like an undergraduate Anaïs Nin, presenting short stories about encounters with ghosts or the spirit world that were sexually explicit. She would often wear a diaphanous peasant blouse as she read these stories to the class. To this day, I find the smell of mimeograph ink kind of a turn-on.
It was almost ten years later that I started to take the idea of writing seriously. I had been initially inspired by reading Patricia Highsmith—and seeing the movies made from
her Ripley novels like The American Friend—but I had never found a way to successfully combine humor with crime fiction and still have it feel authentic and political. Then a friend took me to see a couple of plays by British playwright Joe Orton and they blew my mind. It wasn’t just the irreverence, the sly humor, or the energy and anarchy of Loot and Entertaining Mr. Sloane that changed the way I thought about writing; it was the way Orton articulated his worldview. It wasn’t cheesy or canned or Catskills stand-up; it was smart and funny theater with a punk rock vibe. And I loved that it was a mix of sexual anarchy and irreverent politics, a kind of drunken phallus procession combined with a hearty middle finger extended toward the conformity and conventionalism of the status quo. It was comedy that made you think. The kind of comedy that asks questions and allows an individual to stand up and say what’s on his or her mind—a throwback to the epirrhematic agon—speak truth to the powerful, poke holes in the faulty logic of pedants, mock the small-mindedness of people, and strip away the convenient platitudes of the petit bourgeoisie and reveal something darker underneath. It seemed as if everything was permitted. You could upend the patriarchy and demand justice. As long as you got a laugh.
To paraphrase Che Guevara, the true revolutionary is guided by strong feelings of enjoying a good joke.
A contemporary example might be Jamaican American writer and comedian Sarah Cooper, who creates TikTok clips lip-syncing Donald Trump’s unhinged ramblings. She doesn’t speak out against him, she doesn’t rant, but she uses his own words—and her incredibly funny expressions—not to imitate him but to strip away all the trappings of power, all the skills he uses as a media personality, to reveal what he’s saying and the inexplicable way his thoughts unspool. As writer ZZ Packer wrote in the New York Times, “What she portrays is not his persona but his affect: the glib overconfidence, the lip curl of dismissiveness, the slow nods of fake understanding.”7 Sarah Cooper destroys Trump. She points out how not only does the emperor have no clothes, but he also appears devoid of any understanding of what it means to be human. And the videos are blisteringly funny. For a thin-skinned and self-obsessed egomaniac like Trump, it must be devastating to know the world is laughing at you. Which might explain why he declared the media service a threat to American interests and said, “As far as TikTok is concerned we’re banning them from the United States.”8 Of course he backed off this threat later, but that demonstrates the unique ability of comedy to get under the skin of the powerful.
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