The Full Catastrophe

by James Angelos

  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 Pant
eleimonas 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.”

  To illustrate this point, he took out a few Greek newspaper clippings. One of the headlines, from Kathimerini, read “Nights of Rage at Agios Panteleimonas.” The article told the story of what happened the night of May 26, 2009, when smoke began to billow out of the church basement. Police and fire trucks arrived. A Pakistani was injured on the sidewalk, though no explanation was given as to why, and a raging mob surrounded Prokopios. “You take in the foreigners and throw the Greeks out onto the street!” yelled someone. “We’re giving you one last chance: you have one week to throw them all out!” The angry people were the “ladies and gentlemen of the committee,” Prokopios told me, and the fire in the basement had started because he was housing homeless people there, and one man’s candle fell over and set alight a mattress. The committee members, he said, were screaming: “The Muslims have come and set the church on fire!” But the man who accidentally started the fire happened to be a Greek named Nikos. At this, Maria began to giggle. Prokopios, pleased to make her laugh, tried to keep it up. “Ms. Maria,” he said, “they fell on me like dogs. You know how dogs bark? Like that. Like dogs.” Maria kept giggling, and Prokopios started making vicious dog sounds. “I stop and think, ‘Let them bark at me, our good residents.’ ”

  Prokopios then added something he thought I ought to know. The foreigners saw that the residents hated them, and began to resent it. “They said, ‘We risked our lives to come here. We paid money to smugglers. We did a thousand things. Why did we come here? Because Greece has nice sun and we wanted to do sun therapy?’ ” Maria giggled. “ ‘Did we come to swim on your nice shores?’ ” Prokopios paused and added: “ ‘Why did we come here? To find a better life. Because where we were, we couldn’t live. If we could, we’d leave Greece and go somewhere else. We were forced to come here because it’s the first country we meet across the sea,’ ” he said. “So they started feeling bad, and some got mad.” They thought, “ ‘We didn’t do anything bad to you. Why do you talk to us this way?’ ”

  The notion that the immigrants didn’t do anything bad to the residents directly contradicted the Committee of Residents’ account of the situation. I asked him, therefore, if he hadn’t witnessed the dreadful criminality of which they had spoken. “The criminality was with isolated incidents,” he said. “It wasn’t a general blight. We have a saying in Greece: When a mouse eats the cheese, we don’t say the mouse ate the cheese. We say the mice ate the cheese.” Maria giggled again.

  So it was not a “reign of the fullest and worst forms of violence, crime, and all forms of delinquency?” I asked, paraphrasing the residents’ committee’s 2008 letter.

  “Lies,” he said. “It’s all lies. Exaggerations. There were crimes. There were thefts. Yes, it’s a crime to go and steal one or two cans of food from a store. That’s a crime. But when you, the resident, go to where they’ve rented a house, and where there are ten or fifteen kids inside, and they’re learning the Greek language so they can communicate with the Greeks, and you gather outside and break the windows, and you break inside and throw everyone out, isn’t that a crime? What’s that?” I asked Prokopios to elaborate, and he explained that some “ladies with sensitivities” had started a Greek language school for migrants in the area. Apparently, this upset some locals.

  I asked Prokopios who had closed the playground. He told me it was the Committee of Residents, because they didn’t like immigrants bringing their children there. I told him that the Committee of Residents had told me the playground had become a sleeping area for hundreds, a place of defecation and urination, of cooking and of bathing, of child prostitution and drug dealing, of staphylococcus contamination. “It’s a lie, everything that they’re saying,” Prokopios told me. Yes, he said, during the day a few hundred people would gather in the square “trying to figure out where they’d found themselves,” but at night, most migrants would disappear into overcrowded apartments, rented to them by locals, often at a per-person nightly rate. A few dozen people without money to pay would sleep near the church doors, he said, but no one slept in the playground.

  “It wasn’t a toilet?” I said.

  Prokopios seemed particularly piqued by this suggestion, because, he said, the same people who made such claims “used to piss on the side of the church.” Ms. Maria giggled, and Prokopios raised his voice with a flash of irritation. “It wasn’t the foreigners, but the same people who
are screaming, the residents of the area! They used to piss, and the piss used to trickle down.” He asked Maria to tell me if he was lying.

  “No,” she said. “I used to clean it up.”

  He then asked her if any of the migrants who slept in or next to the church ever bothered her.

  “Never,” she said.

  Why then, I asked Prokopios, would the Committee of Residents lie? “That’s the secret mystery,” he said, though certainly there were political reasons behind all the tumult at Agios Panteleimonas. The foreigners were used to create a fuss: “There had to be a lot of noise, so that some political groups could emerge, to be heard. They found the cause, with these issues, these big fusses, which were created without any reason.” And so Golden Dawn, which was hidden in the beginning, began to appear. One small example of this emergence, as Prokopios remembered it, occurred on a Sunday after he’d finished the liturgy. He was walking down the steps of the church when a young man approached him and gave him a Golden Dawn party newspaper. Prokopios took the newspaper, looked at it, and then replied to the young man: “Thank you very much. Take it back now.” The young man didn’t appreciate this response and insulted the cleric and his place of origin, the island of Rhodes. In response, Prokopios recounted to the young man a phrase attributed to Anacharsis, the sixth-century B.C. Scythian philosopher who migrated to Athens from a region near the Black Sea. When one pretentious Athenian insulted Anacharsis over the comparatively lowly status of his homeland, the philosopher is said to have responded: “My country is a shame. You, however, are a shame for your country.” The Golden Dawn adherent just walked away, Prokopios recalled, adding that it was a shame to see such young people “enslave themselves” to the party. He considered the party members, full of rage and hatred, to be possessed by Satan.