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.