Travel and timing provided good excuses to put off my final podcast and blog, but something happened yesterday that jolted me out of my happy back-to-school transition and made it necessary to speak up. The Greek Forum of Refugees moved to a new office last week. It is still in the Exarcheia neighborhood, just on a new street called Notara, and it is much bigger than the two rooms we had before, where people sometimes sat on stacks of paper instead of chairs and used hand-repaired computers that tech-savvy refugees found and fixed from the side of the road.
The new space is more than an officeβit will serve as a community center for the local refugee and migrant communities and organizations to meet and hold events. It has been an exciting and promising time to finally start the move into the new office. But yesterday, I found out that on the very same street as our new office, just a few buildings down, there was a hate-fueled arson attack on a refugee squat.
Luckily no one was hurt, but the damage is significant. In fact, the reason that GFR moved to Exarcheia in the first place is because their previous office was vandalized, and Yonous and other members of GFR were physically attacked. He used to not talk about this incidentβhe kept it a secret for almost a year after it happened, at the same time fighting along with Human Rights Watch to get local legislation passed against hate crimes targeting migrants.
But speaking out about his own experience helped garner support, and those efforts catalyzed a significant decrease in xenophobic attacks in Athens over the past 6 years. Listen below to hear more. Well, sort of. Because almost everywhere I go in Athens, the walls are shouting at me. The art that often accompanies or stands in place of the messages is even more telling: a young, distorted man crawling with the burden of a city on his back, Tsipras and Merkel in a passionate embrace.
But to me, the city is beautiful in a way that feels more real than the historic architecture of other European cities. The walls are passionate and political, they speak of institutional disdain and sympathy with the rejects of society. I absolutely love it. I love the grungy, dirty, complicated mess of Athens, and I love listening to the walls when they speak. They tell vibrant stories of struggle and solidarity, and I think that just taking a walk around Athens, never meeting a Greek in person, would convince you that the city is both complicated and compassionate.
