The spirit of anti-capitalism

It never for a moment looked like today was going to be tranquil. Even by 6:30, when I set out for the ancient agora from Alopekis Street, there were big blue police vans blocking the streets leading to Syntagma. I was able to cut the north-west corner of the square, though, by the McDonald's. There was broken glass everywhere on the ground, and huge cracks like spider webs adorned the windows of any shops facing onto the square. When I turned onto Ermou there was a Greek security guard sitting in a doorway, and he looked up when he saw me and said 'Ellada, eh, Greece!' with mock enthusiasm.

At the excavation I tidied up my scarp (the edge of a trench) and swept for hours to prepare the area for a photograph, to be taken by my supervisor. In the next space over was the Greek friend who had took me to Syntagma yesterday. I asked her how the protests went and she said 'alright'. I asked her if she thought the austerity measures would pass through parliament and she said she thought they would, but hoped they wouldn't. She also said that she'd worked through the text of the bill with a friend, an accountant, who said that any company with Greece's finances would be going 'straight to hell'.

When I tried to walk through Syntagma the same way I did yesterday, from the south-west to the north-east corner and then home, I immediately realized that things were different this time around. There were many times more people; whereas the virtually empty road separating the center of the square from Ermou served as a boundary line yesterday, today I couldn't even make it onto that street because of the crowds of people. Most had white faces and some had home-made or low-end gas-masks. I passed a tall bald German man with a large camera talking in a reporter's tones into his mobile, and then a young Greek man shouting passionately at a group of other Greek youths, presumably exhorting them to some great deed.

When I reached the north-west corner, I looked up past the city's poshest hotels to where a lot of the action seemed to be happening. I could see an amazing number of stones being flung from the mass of protestors towards the police, some from several meters back in the crowd. After a while, the police shot tear-gas canisters at the crowd, and it pulled back, creating a no-man's land about ten meters wide. A few brave protestors went up into that space, kicking the tear-gas canisters back towards the police and hurling rocks at them from only a few meters away. When the tear-gas had died down, these men turned to the crowd and raised their arms, at which point the crowd erupted into cheers and applause. When, soon afterwards, the police let off another round of tear-gas, the crowd booed and hissed.

As the first ranks of protestors turned to flee from the tear-gas, everyone in the area a hundred or so meters back where I was standing also turned, and began walking westwards along the alley that Basilea Sofia narrows into at that end of Syntagma. Some people were slightly panicky; others stopped and turned around frequently to get a view of what was happening or to record it on with their phones; a few people seemed to be encouraging others to stand their ground. At that point a column of a dozen or so riot police marched through the crowd, apparently on their way to the front. The crowd sent up an awful booing and hissing, and a few people threw things at them from a few feet away.

After a while there was more tear-gas, and more shepherding of us back away from the square. This was the only point at which I had any sense of being in danger, not because of the explosions of the stun-grenades and tear-gas canisters the police were firing or because of the peppery tickle of tear-gas in my nose and mouth, but because of the mass of people moving unpredictably. I eventually made my way up to Panepisitimiou again, where I turned and saw two large fires burning in the middle of the street.

I thought about staying to watch what was going on for a little longer, but then turned up towards Kolonaki, an area apparently perpetually insulated from serious disturbances. I'd seen enough of the riots to ask myself yet again what exactly the protestors were doing it for. If the police had suddenly vanished, would they actually have burst into Parliament and strangled Papandreou where he stood? At the head of the demonstrators, nearest to Parliament, I'd seen a large banner reading 'amesi dimokratia' (direct democracy), but the slogan seemed tarnished.

The Protestant ethic

It looked like today was going to be pretty tranquil. I'd heard that the government would be voting again on the austerity measures demanded by the EU and the IMF, I'd read that the unions had called a general strike, and I knew that the indignants had called for a huge protest on Syntagma. But when I walked down to Syntagma this morning, there were no police men waving me away, and no massed ranks of police vans, only a modest blockade of Irodou Attikou, where the Presidential Residence is. And after I'd made one pass of my hourglass-shaped trench, and well before the sun had gotten to me, I was sent to wash pottery by the Stoa of Attalus.

Washing pottery is a pretty pleasant task, especially when compared to digging. Equally monotonous, it has the advantage of allowing you to sit down and talk with other diggers around a tub of water, like campers around a fire. Today I worked through two or three buckets of coarse sherds with the two Greek students who work on our excavation, which allowed me to pick up some useful new phrases in modern Greek ('I am tired and hungry'). It also allowed me to hear about the University of Athens, Greek-led archaeology in Greece, and what two students thought about the government.

They didn't think much of it. One of them had heard - and the other believed - that the police had been deliberately allowing central Athens to fill up with immigrants, which was driving housing costs down, allowing those linked to the political elite to snap up valuable properties for artificially low prices. People didn't want to live downtown with immigrants because the most desperate among them could be driven to crime - as in a recent case of a man who was shot for his camera while preparing to drive his wife, who had just gone into labour, to hospital.

At the end of the day I walked with one of the agorathenians through Monastiraki Square, where she called a friend on her mobile asking if they were protesting in Syntagma. We then walked up into Syntagma from the south-west side, with the scene around us becoming gradually more chaotic as we went on. When we entered the square itself I could hear what sounded like shots being fired again, and over in the north-west corner of the square there was a flame several feet high licking the gassy air. There seemed to be some sort of skirmishing going on in that area, but most of the action appeared to be concentrated at the eastern edge of the square, where it faces onto the National Parliament.

As we crossed over into the main part of the square a young man wearing a mask approached us holding a spray-bottle. He sprayed my friend in the face, and then, after giving me time to remove my sunglasses, did the same to me. When I looked at my friend again, her face was covered with what looked like white stage makeup; she told me it was Maalox, a kind of stomach medicine that the protesters put on their faces to mitigate the effects of tear gas. There were people all around us with similarly whitewashed faces, walking to and from talking, and occasionally setting fire to cans of garbage.

When we got up to Amalias, the street which divides the square from Parliament, my Greek colleague went to join her friends at the protest while I turned towards the north-east exit of the square. My conversation with George had confirmed that I disagreed with the vast majority of the protestors' beliefs, and I already knew that I did not sympathize with their methods. I passed an immigrant selling bottled water, looked up at the rows of policemen, six or seven deep, outside of Parliament, and went onto Panepistimiou.

It was only when I got onto Panepistimiou that I started being bothered by the tear gas. It looked like there was a small band of policemen firing canisters in the alleyway where the Cartier and Bulgari shops are, along with the cafe where I'd been charged 6 Euros for a double cappuccino a fortnight previously. When I stopped to wait for the light to change so that I could cross Akadimias, I noticed two policemen standing near me in full riot gear, looking like futuristic re-imaginings of medieval knights. There was a young couple rushing to get their baby away from the encroaching clouds of tear gas.

Then I was in Kolonaki. Three ladies took a break from their al fresco lunch to giggle at me, and an older man stopped me, pointing at my face. I tried to tell him in Greek that someone else had done my make-up, and he laughed but gestured to me to wipe it off, saying 'astynomia' (police). When I got home one of my American flatmates had been searched by them on the way home, while the other had some pictures of the rioting, including one of a masked man approaching McDonald's with two chunks of marble in his hands. My US colleagues were not impressed. 'We come here to study the founders of modern civilization,' one complained, 'and instead what we get are these damn hooligans!'

Real democracy

Today on the way back from the dig I stopped under the sign saying 'real democracy' and looked again at some of the leaflets and posters they had displayed on their table. Last time I'd hardly lingered long enough to confirm that they weren't making reference to Frank Bryan's solid study of the New England town meeting, but this time I stayed for enough time for one of the people behind the table to ask me if I had any questions.

When he realized that I had several, he gestured for me to join him in an area with a few chairs between the stream of shoppers passing through the square and the protestors' makeshift camp. The man - I'll call him George here, because that was his name (and because it hardly blows his cover in Athens) - was middle-aged and filthy, with awful teeth. He spoke English well, which was a relief (my modern Greek is not up to political disputation). He offered me a biscuit, which I accepted, and a cigarette, which I declined.

George wanted to get one thing clear: the Greeks don't owe anybody anything. He seemed to have three main ways of getting back to this conclusion, and made use of them as soon as the conversation looked like it might go anywhere else. First, the Greeks don't owe the Germans anything because the Germans violated the country during World War II and never paid reparations. Second, the Greeks don't owe anybody anything because the terms of the loans they took out were unfair. Third, the Greek people don't owe anybody anything because the loans were made by politicians, not by the people themselves.

Greece's deputy PM Theodoros Pangalos accused Germany last year of failing to pay Greece back for gold looted during the war. The German foreign ministry quickly issued a rebuttal, pointing out that Germany had paid around 115 million DM to Greece in formal war reparations in 1960, and estimated that over 30 billion DM had flowed from Berlin to Athens in EU transfers since then. In any case, even if Greece did not owe Germany any money for whatever reason, it would still owe plenty of money to other creditors at the national and sub-national levels in France, the UK and the US.

George made his second point with a particular vivid analogy. 'Say you have a wife and two kids', he said, 'and I lend you money. Would you not try to stop me if several years later, when you couldn't pay up, I came to your house, killed your kids and fucked your wife?' Like many of the analogies bandied about by the opponents of the austerity measures, this struck me as somewhat over the top: nobody, as far as we know, has at this point been directly raped or murdered by employees of the foreign banks holding Greek debt.

Even if we change the terms of the example, though, it doesn't follow from my making a bad deal that I should be released entirely from fulfilling the terms of the deal, unless I've been forced to accept the deal under threat of violence, or if the terms are so egregiously disadvantageous that I would never have chosen them had I been in my right mind. But neither case seems to apply to Greece, which took out its loans entirely willingly after entry into the Eurozone at very good rates of interest compared to those that are common in international money-markets nowadays.

I had more sympathy with George's third complaint: that the Greek people were being made to suffer the consequences of decisions they had little to do with themselves, while the politicians who made them were shielded from the fallout. I could have pointed out that the Greek people also profited, for a time, from the loans their government obtained for them; but I preferred to seize the opportunity to agree with George, adding that if he had grown up in his city in classical times he would have been able to discuss and vote on his city's policies directly, one at a time, without having to cede control of the state for four or five years to a set of politicians.

This led to the question I really wanted to ask: given that the system we have now is defective, what were he and his co-indignants planning on putting in its place? 'The system of Pericles' he said (by which I took him to be referring to the classical Athenian system as a whole, and not to be excluding innovations, like pay for attending the assembly, that were introduced after the famous statesman's death in 429 BC). I told him I thought that was a wonderful idea, provided women were enfranchised and there were no slaves.

But I also pushed him on what exactly a revived Athenian system would look like nowadays, when nations are so much larger and technological complexity has increased so much. On this subject he had little to say, but said that he and his comrades would get to that; the first step was to combat the present system. This worried me: as another Greek put it a long time ago, links in a chain of thought that come later temporally may yet be prior analytically; or as my American flatmate expressed it this afternoon, destroying a regime without having a good idea of what to put in its place is pretty damn stupid. In fact, he implied that it reminded him of Donald Rumsfeld before the most recent war in Iraq, a comparison that the protestors would probably not be too happy about.

I'm not saying that the dream of reviving genuine popular participation, inspired by models from ancient Greece and elsewhere, is dead; only that it would require the most meticulous institutional design to be sustainable, and that arriving at it might be less painful working with our current quasi-democratic state-forms rather than against them. Meanwhile, the protestors I met will be preparing to confront the rows of police again tomorrow and the day after, as their rulers vote on another package of austerity measures designed to reassure those foreign banks. I will be monotonously brushing layers of dirt off stones, pieces of a bigger picture that might tell us how the ancients did something we now can't.

A Marathon day

Today a few other agorapparatchiks and I walked to Victoria Station - yes, Athens has one too - and got on a regional bus to Marathon. This is where about 10 000 Athenian faced up to around 30 000 Persian invaders in the year 490 BC, sending them scurrying back to their ships. Those 'barbarians' who were still alive then used those ships to sail around the tip of Attica (which juts out into the Aegean) with the aim of making a second, more direct attempt on Athens itself. According to the historian Herodotus, the Athenian soldiers, exhausted from battle, nonetheless rushed all the way back to Athens just in time to dissuade the Persians from trying to land again.

Before looking at a modern map of Attica, it had seemed to me to be a good idea to try to make this historic walk, as the classicist and soldier N.G.L. Hammond did in the 1950s. Unfortunately the spread of modern Athens has by now turned most of that walk into a dreary procession through concrete suburbs, so I thought we might walk from Marathon to Rhamnous instead. But when we got up to Marathon we realized that we had better get a taxi to the site; Greek archaeological sites and museums close at 3pm, and it was already past noon.

Rhamnous was one of over 100 'demes', or villages, which were constituent parts of the classical Athenian state. Being enrolled in a deme was what granted you Athenian citizenship; this in turn entitled you to having your name entered for service in the Council, and also gave you the right to attend and vote in the popular Assembly, Athens' sovereign decision-making body. The site of Rhamnous is stunning - a cluster of ancient houses set against the sparkling Aegean, with the island of Euboea stretching out under the sun in the distance.

Whether any of the demes' ancient inhabitants actually walked all the way to Athens to participate in the Assembly's debates and decisions has been doubted by some historians, and now I know why. All I did in the end was walk back from Rhamnous to Marathon, and that took me around three hours of hiking in the unforgiving Mediterranean sun. Walking from Rhamnous (admittedly one of the more distant demes) to Athens would have taken about a day, and it seems unlikely that your average farmer have given up two days' work for the return journey, even after citizens who attended the Assembly started being given a small stipend by the state in the 390s BC.

It would be hard to exaggerate the importance of the battle of Marathon in the Athenian imaginary and in subsequent Western culture. Ancient sources tell us that in the epitaph of Aeschylus, usually considered among the greatest playwrights in history, there was no mention of any of his tragedies; the way he chose to be remembered instead was as a citizen who fought at Marathon. John Stuart Mill in the 19th century rather bizarrely claimed that Marathon was a more important event in British history than the battle of Hastings. Though I've seen the battlefield before, I skipped it today; it was already 6pm, and I was tired from my trek through the countryside. Unworthy, perhaps, of the ancestors I have chosen for myself, I bought a cold drink and waited for the air-conditioned bus to come.

The oracle

I met up with an Athenian friend (to be referred to, pseudonymously, as Phoebus by this agora-nonymous blogger) tonight for a cold cappuccino among the elegant denizens of Kolonaki. He heard out my views on the financial crisis but had a few complications to add to my clean picture. There were two main ones, and I think they say a lot about the mistrust that exists between many Greeks and their governing institutions and officials. He had a lot of other things to say besides, but they were complex, difficult to interpret, and overwhelmingly in hexameter verse.

First of all he suggested that a few members of the Greek political elite - together with a few members of the international financial elite - had been arranging loans without the full consent of parliament and without following the proper procedures. Because of this, many Greeks (especially those who found employment with the state in the boom years and are now out of work) feel that it would be unfair to force the Greek nation to pay back loans on terms improperly contracted by a few.

Secondly - and at points his voice quietened somewhat - he alleged that members of the police were manufacturing outbursts of violence so that they could seem justifying in clearing large numbers of protestors from the square using truncheons and tear gas. He implied that plain-clothed agents, or sometimes simply right-wing conspirators, were being planted among the protestors, so that they could throw enough stones at the cops for violent counter-measures to appear proportionate.

The oracle had many other things to say besides, along the lines of the analyses that have appeared in the British and American press, about the failure of Greece to develop her own industries with the money it borrowed. But most interesting to me was the distinctive character of the first Greek voice I've had the opportunity to consult at any length during my first fortnight here. Whatever the international press may say about the need for Greece to pull together to solve the problems now pressing upon them, it's clear that there are trenches of mistrust between the people and their overseers that go much deeper than superficial political squabbling.

Greece, economic powerhouse?

A friend - to be known on this blog as to scranton (singular, neuter substantive) - has forwarded to me an article about the debt crisis by a Greek writer living in London. The piece is a good example of what many young Greeks, including many of those who are joining the protests in Syntagma, seem to be thinking about what is happening in their country. I thought I might discuss it here, partly because it has a certain rhetorical force and is a good read in itself, but also because it may allow us an insight into what is driving the resistance of many Greeks to their government's attempts to clear their debt.

The real substance of the article lies in an attempt to distinguish between reality and what the author thinks are simply 'media myths'. The core myths, according to the author, are those that support the notions that Greece is an uncompetitive economy that should not have been admitted into the Euro, and that austerity measures are now necessary if the nation is not to default on its loans, a situation that would lead to economic disaster for Greece as well as its neighbours. The author's obvious partiality to his native country, we might think, may turn out to be balanced by his insider's knowledge of his country's situation.

It is always useful to be made to question timeworn assumptions, especially if they take the form of prejudices, such as 'the Greeks are just lazy', that are flattering to ourselves by implicit comparison. And indeed, the author of the article presents data drawn from respected international institutions (such as the OECD) suggesting that Greeks work more hours per year than Germans or Brits, and that they produce more per hour than the Germans, Brits, or Americans. But though one of these claims may well be true, it seems difficult to combine both of them without coming to the conclusion that Greece has a higher annual GDP per capita than Germany, Britain or the USA; and if the author of the article believes that, he will have to argue against the figures of the IMF, the World Bank and the CIA. (I have to suspect, then, that there is something awry at UPenn's Center for International Comparisons, the source for his data on productivity per hour.)

The author devotes one paragraph to arguing against the view that Greece has a weak economy, citing the World Bank's classification of his country as 'high income', and boasting that Greece came 24th in the World Bank's 2009 list of wealthiest countries by GDP per capita. Nobody would deny that, in global terms, and compared to third-world countries, Greece is a high income economy. But the real point - and the real cause of the current crisis - is that Greece is a low income economy compared to other nations within the Eurozone. That Greece is much wealthier than Tanzania (145th on the World Bank's list) isn't relevant to the debt crisis; that it is significantly poorer than the Netherlands (9th on the list), with which it shares a currency, is sharply relevant.

In trying to show that Greece is a longstanding member of the club of wealthy, democratic nations, the author overreaches himself. The claim that 'Greece became the first associate member of the EEC outside the bloc of six founding members (Germany, France, Italy and the Benelux countries) in 1962, much before the UK' is unimportant and misleading: associate membership, granted to countries who need time to prepare for full membership, is hardly a mark of economic maturity. What is important is to recall that Greece was allowed to become the tenth full member of the EEC only in 1981, 8 years after Britain had joined and only 7 years after the reestablishing of democratic governance after the regime of the colonels.

A final 'myth' the author wishes to explode is the idea that the bailouts are designed 'to help the Greek people', whereas in fact they are calculated 'to stabilize and buy time for the Eurozone'. But only the grossest dogmatism would lead anyone to think that the bailouts must be designed either for the benefit of the people, or of the Eurozone (and its financial markets), but under no circumstances of both. And part of the reason for the resilience of the current global crisis is that the finances of different nations, banks, and individuals are now all inextricably interconnected, so that a Greek default might harm the Spanish just as much as it harms the Greeks.

To be clear, what would likely happen if Greece were to default would be as follows. Greece would be kicked out of the Eurozone by its other members. The ancient drachma would be revived, only to depreciate rapidly. This might help Greece's competitiveness somewhat, making tourism in the country even more attractive and boosting its few exports. But it would be very difficult for Greece, after having defaulted, to borrow money from anyone, and it would be forced to go through with its cuts on social programs in any case. Meanwhile, the money lost by creditors in France and Germany would weaken these large economies, casting ripples of instability through Europe and out beyond into the wider world.

Sharing sherds

As any of you reading this will almost certainly know already, this blog started life as a series of emails home to family and friends. After writing two or three separate emails a day to my parents, my girlfriend, and others telling them about what I'd seen that day in the excavations or protests, I decided I could send them updates more efficiently by just writing a blog. Which was true - but as soon as I started writing the blog as a blog rather than as emails, I started to have to think much more about what I was writing.

I'm not just talking about the sense I now have that there might be other readers out there somewhere, and of having to tailor things to a slightly wider audience. I'm also bringing up a point about archaeology as a contemporary practice that I've already come across one or two times on this, my first dig. The problem, put simply, is that archaeology carries on (like many professions) in its approach to intellectual property as if social media didn't exist. But, as you may have realized, they do exist.

More fully, the problem is that traditionally, the person who finds an object has the right to publish it. (Except, of course, that it's really the director or the supervisor of the workman or student who finds the object who exercises that right.) This traditional situation was problematic enough in itself, since archaeologists who were not quick to prepare things for publication could sit on finds for years or decades, thus depriving a whole generation of scholars of useful material for research (and career-advancement).

There were also leaks. Technically, the local ephorate (see the post below) should know about a find before it goes public. But I was told recently about an episode a few decades ago involving the ephorate, the then director of the excavation, and the Painted Stoa (a portico in the ancient city which displayed paintings of Athenian military victories). After uncovering the Painted Stoa, the then director told a journalist from a popular magazine about it before the ephorate had gotten around to asking about the new find. When the building appeared in the next month's issue of the magazine, the ephorate complained to the director, who suggested to the officials that they might have found out earlier had they asked earlier. The reaction of the ephorate to this was to suspend the excavations for a few seasons while relations normalized.

But such leaks happened only as quickly as printing presses could print. Nowadays, all that is required is for a student digger to post a picture of a new find onto Facebook or Twitter, and an unpublished inscription can be available to all that person's friends, or the entire Internet, instantaneously. It's not surprising, then, that we were given guidelines at the beginning of the dig, the central regulation being: no photographs of finds on social media. The same, of course, applies to blogs. So while my family and friends can eagerly await reports of sherds and stones when I arrive home, there won't be any report of them here; just the impressions and musings of a tiro in archaeology at the epicenter of the European sovereign debt crisis.

A Byzantine crossroads

I was quite surprised this morning when I was able to walk through Syntagma Square on the quickest route to the site without meeting any real police presence. I had thought that I'd read that there was to be another important vote in the Greek Parliament, this time a vote of confidence after PM George Papandreou had installed a new cabinet (including a new finance minister, Evangelos Venizelos). As it turned out, the vote happened last night, and though the wreckage was much less than it was a week ago, I did wonder whether I had a cold before recognizing the tart odour of tear gas left hanging in the air from the night before. The real crunch vote, it turned out, will be next week, when Parliament votes again on the austerity measures necessary for Greece to receive its latest bailout.

As I walked between the rows of protestors camped out on the square, I found it hard to sympathize with them, despite their obvious idealism. (One sign said 'Real Democracy', which caught my eye - but alas, references to the Cleisthenic constitution were in short supply.) In one sense, the debt crisis is deceptively simple. The Greek government has now to impose austerity measures on the Greek people because the nation spent more money than it had. Most of the welfare programs the protestors are trying to protect are admirable, and the cutbacks will surely hurt Greeks hard, but in the final analysis it's hard not to agree that Greece must pay its own way in the world. In other words, dream your socialist dreams all you want - just don't try to realize the ones you can't afford. This is obviously something close to the thoughts of many Germans, who have scrupulously not borrowed more than they could afford to borrow over the past few years.

On the other hand, there is the question I raised with my American flatmates last night: don't the wealthy states of the US effectively subsidize the poorer states? They must, since the US has a single currency, so that Alabama can't make its products more competitive by depreciating its currency. Instead, it has to take the hit for the rest of the union by becoming poorer, in the way the Conservative MEP Daniel Hannan argues that Greece is now being forced to do for the sake of the Euro. In return, Alabama must receive not only the benefits of common goods created by the union (such as security), but also transfers of various sorts (at least, I know that this happens within the Canadian confederation). Plainly, then, this sort of situation could also become the norm in the EU, if (and it is a huge 'if') the northern European nations could be brought to think of their southern neighbours as compatriots, fellow Europeans worthy of the solicitude and generosity of their peers.

This Greek crisis, I thought as I walked by the Byzantine Church in a junction on Ermou Street, is a crossroads for Europe. If the EU does bail Greece out again (and maybe another time before this is all over), it will set a precedent that would set Europe on a path towards ever-closer union. If it doesn't, it effectively marks the end of the European project, and a decisive demonstration that monetary and political union, if they are to go anywhere at all, must walk hand in hand.

Fall of a wall

Today I walked down to the dig with another little box of tzadziki, which did not explode in my new bag. I went down as usual to the trench I'd been assigned to for my first two-week rotation, next to the railway line, but on the same side of the modern road as most of the excavated Agora. For the past week or so we have been clearing a particular area of plants and garbage and other fill, so that we could begin digging in earnest around the level excavators reached last time they dug in that area, in the 1970s. We were expected to be able to make actual digging 'passes' (going over a certain space of ground with our tools) today, but alas, our hopes were dashed.

The whole of Greece is divided into various archaeological 'ephorates' who grant (or, sometimes) refuse permits and supervise whatever archaeological excavations foreign institutions are doing. Today an official came round when we were about to start digging and insisted that we should pull down most of a wall we had left standing, in case it fell onto us as we were working. We could hardly be annoyed, since the official clearly had our best interests at heart, but it was slightly dismaying to see the Greek workmen topple an entire modern wall onto our carefully swept area! Of course this meant that we had to spend another day clearing modern dirt off the surface before we could start digging. In a trench across the road they pulled out an entire coarse-ware amphora from the fifth century BC.

Tzadziki versus camera

This morning I packed my bag with some tzadziki and bread for the lunch break and headed down to the site. When I opened my bag to put the tzadziki in the fridge in the Stoa of Attalus (a building owned by the American School which we use as our HQ), I was dismayed to see that all my stuff was covered with garlicky yoghurt! I salvaged my visa and old passports (which were in good shape in the front pouch), wiped the yoghurt off from my Greek mini-dictionary (a gift from my sister to her mythology-mad little brother at Christmas in 1991), but ended up throwing away my backpack and camera. The backpack was a ten-dollar one I just bought recently. The camera was my sister's digital hand-me-down. It was pretty thoroughly soaked in delectable dip, and I had in any case been having trouble finding a replacement battery for it in Athens and was thinking of getting a new camera anyway.

A taste of tear-gas

This morning some policeman waved me away from Syntagma Square, which I usually walk through on the way from my flat to the dig. Behind them there were half a dozen big armoured police vans. When I was walking home this afternoon I couldn't get anywhere near Syntagma since there were so many people. In the distance though I could see the banners of a demonstration up near the parliament building. As I skirted the square I saw lots of people making signs and one man at a stall selling Greek flags and whistles, apparently useful equipment if you want to join a protest. All the cafes I walked by were even fuller than normal, with people talking animatedly over coffee. People were stopping outside of newspaper stands to read the front pages of all the domestic newspapers. I couldn't really figure out exactly what was happening though until I got home and looked at the BBC website. Parliament was going to be voting on a new set of austerity measures that had to be met to guarantee a bailout from the EU or IMF, and the unions had called a general strike in reaction. The article said the police used tear gas on the protestors but I didn't see any violence at all, only a bunch of people enjoying an extra day off.

Later on when I went out to find a cafe where I could read and have my usual late afternoon frappé (a cold coffee popular here), the picture was quite different. As I walked down towards Panepistimiou, which runs into Syntagma Square, I could hear what sounded like gunshots, except slightly deeper - what I imagine mortar or artillery fire must sound like. When I got to Panepistimiou there were crowds of people looking over at Syntagma, trying to get a view of the protests and the clashes with police, but obviously not wanting to get too close to the action. I passed a Japanese couple who looked startled by the sudden explosions; there was a Greek man sitting on the curb smoking and saying to them, 'None of this will affect you' in English. Around this time I began to notice that a lot of people looked like they had colds, with red eyes and runny noses, and a lot of people also had handkerchiefs over their mouths and noses, or even had part of their shirts covering the lower halves of the their faces. Then I passed a bunch of policemen with gas-masks on and simultaneously started to feel like sneezing, like someone had just thrown ground pepper on my face. By this time I'd realized that I and the people around me were suffering the mild effects of the tear-gas used by the police in front of Parliament, and wafted over to where we were standing, not 500 meters away. The next morning around 6, as I walked through a Syntagma covered with rubbish and surrounded by shops with smashed windows, the sharp scent of the stuff was still lingering in the air.