Athens

Dying neighbourhoods, lost inhabitants: The debt crisis is destroying Athens’ light-heartedness and altering the character of the Greek capital city.

Nikitas Karagiannis is gazing over Europe’s most beautiful ugly city. The burly, bald-headed man is sitting on the rock of Areios Pagos, high above the Greek capital city. In the west, the sun is sinking into the sea, bathing the lime rock and the Acropolis behind it in an orange glow. The Attican light draws tourists to this spot. “The crisis has changed Athens and its people,” says Karagiannis. Visitors hardly notice it.

The city is a hybrid of the ancient and modern. New stands beside old, erosion and permanence characterize Athens. A monster of concrete, asphalt and steel crowding onto the mountain slopes to the north, east and south. Since the military dictatorship and excessive residential construction in the late sixties, the city has never been beautiful. “Athens only shone one single time,” says Karagiannis, for the Olympic Games in 2004. This moment of happiness was fleeting.

For more than 15 years, Karagiannis has been wandering the streets and lanes of Athens as a cultural reporter. The Greek was born and went to school here, he studied art and sociology. The 53-year-old worked as a model in the 1980s, and travelled throughout Europe. He worked as a photographer in London and Paris. In Rome he fell in love with an American. He then spent a few years in Miami and Los Angeles. Karagiannis has seen much of the world, but Athens always called him back. “I love the city for its history and the happy times I spent here.”


He tells of the strong sweet aroma that the bitter orange trees exude in the spring. When he walks through Athens today, his home city seems foreign to him. The debt crisis has hit Athens hard. It reveals itself in the city centre. Around Omonia Square, what was hidden atop Areios Pagos becomes apparent. “This part of Athens has been one of the most dangerous places for the past six or seven years,” says Karagiannis. He no longer comes here often. Natives warn tourists not to come here, especially at night.

Misery on Omonia Square

North of the square, paint is flaking from the walls of the houses; the cold and damp have deteriorated the plaster on the façades. Smeared roller blinds and dented metal bars hide the halls of former supermarkets, boutiques and department stores. Dozens of shops and hotels have closed, some of which opened for the Olympic Games. Rubbish is piled in the bins on the kerbstones. On the pavements merchants have set up tables and sell cheap plastic goods. People hurry through the streets. A woman squats on a step begging for change, mumbling to herself.

This area flourished a century ago, venerable shops opened, the rents rose. The debt crisis and austerity programmes finally brought this era to an end. Unemployment is at 26 percent – 1.3 million of the Greek people. The youth lack any prospects, more than half of the under 24-year-olds cannot find a job. The wages of those that still have work were cut by 30 or 40 percent. The country is saving; the people are paying for it.


The immigrants living on Omonia Square feel this the most. The rents have been dropping for thirty years now and many native Athenians moved out. It got too crowded for them. Immigrants searching for work took over the inexpensive flats. But since the crisis no one here has been able to find work. Social benefits were cut. Hardly anyone will even hire clandestine workers, or when they finish the job, they blow the whistle on them in order to not have to pay them.

Immigrants and refugees feel the anger

It is said that 700,000 refugees illegally entered Greece between 2006 and 2011. They come from Africa, Asia, the Balkans and the Arabic Peninsula. They ended up in a concrete slum, where they live by the dozens on a few square metres.

Dirty blankets, newspaper, plastic bags and cigarette butts are strewn in many entryways. It reeks of rot and urine. “A few years ago Athens had practically no homeless people,” says Karagiannis. The few who had no homes were known by name to the residents in the neighbourhood. The people slipped them food, sometimes they offered them a place to sleep overnight. “This is the way that Greek society worked on a small scale,” says Karagiannis.


Police officers walk the streets in heavy boots and navy blue uniforms. They wear bulletproof vests. “The police ostensibly want to free the area from the undesirables and outlaws and the drug problems,” says Karagiannis. “But what they are actually doing is holding little pogroms.” About twenty people crowd into a side lane. Officers are controlling a few men in front of a garage. Maybe it’s about drugs, or maybe the suspects are immigrants without resident permits. There are shouts, weak protests.

Rising xenophobia

The men fall silent when a motorcycle zooms past. The fear of attacks is great. At night masked figures often wander the pavements. They club down the immigrants with sticks. “I’ve even seen neo-Nazis hunting for immigrants,” says Karagiannis. The police hardly do anything to stop them; some people even suspect that the officers are involved in some of the attacks.

Xenophobia has risen in Greece. The agitators from the Golden Dawn have benefited from this. Last year, the neo-Nazis entered parliament for the first time with this party. They deliberately aim the anger of the Greeks over the misery of the nation against immigrants. Over the past three years, immigrants were attacked and injured hundreds of time. Public order minister Dendias talks of an invasion of refugees that will pull the country into the abyss.

What’s happening here goes beyond a certain scope, says Karagiannis. Every large city has neighbourhoods with many immigrants as well as places with drug problems. It used to be that this did not greatly affect Athens. “The city thrived on the way that people of different cultures met and mixed.”

People flee from everyday life

Hope and confidence have left Athens. The people break through their everyday listlessness in only a few places. In the Gazi quarter, which until recently suffered the same fate as the neighbourhood around Omonia Square, Athenians escape into the night.

“Enjoying life is the Greek mentality,” says Karagiannis. Until the 1990s, Gazi was one of the poorest quarters in Athens, with its shoddy little shanties, remnants of the workers’ quarter from the days when the gas factory hummed in the mid-19th century. Much changed around the old gasometer at the turn of the century. Athens put a lot of money into this part of the city; the historic factory was turned into a cultural centre and a museum. Bars and clubs opened.

At night, motor scooters and cars squeeze past the pedestrians walking down the crowded lanes near the Kerameikos metro station. Karagiannis is also able to forget here. He often comes here with friends. Young and old Greeks, immigrants, tourists, students, gays and lesbians – they all celebrate into the morning together.

In the clubs the partiers feel each other’s sweat on the skin, gasping for breath on the dance floors. The crisis disappears for a few hours behind the bass beats and neon lights. It’s a manic escape into pleasure. “The Greeks spend their last euros on a drink,” says Karagiannis. Many cannot really afford these nights out. Anyone who does have work has far less cash than last month. Even the minimum wage was cut by 20 percent to about 600 euros per month, which has to pay for the rent, electricity, water, taxes and insurance.


But the crisis is not entirely invisible even in Gazi. On cold days, the place smells of charred wood and plastic. People can’t afford heating oil. Instead they burn cheap firewood, trash and old furniture. The streets are veiled in smog.

“The decadence of Greek society is reflected no where as much as in Athens,” says Karagiannis. Cronyism and corruption have always been a problem. Before the crisis it was impossible to even get a driving license without paying kickbacks. The political class and the rich patriarchs lined their own pockets. There’s a lack of vision and passion, says Karagiannis. All of this is breaking the country’s back.

Athens has suffered before

It has gotten cool on Areios Pagos above the rooftops of Athens. The sea has swallowed the sun. The visitors get ready to leave. Karagiannis pulls on his hat that falls onto his neck like a tuft. How can this city escape the lethargy? Athens has already overcome major crises just in the 20th century. In the 1920s it was the slum quarters where the Greeks fled from the massacres of the Turks in the Ottoman Empire. During the Second World War the city suffered under the German occupation that let tens of thousands of people starve to death. Civil war followed the World War and in the late 1960s, the military terrorized the city.

This time it’s the debt crisis. It is a creeping deterioration that Karagiannis is observing in his home city. He can’t give up on it. He wants Europe to see what is happening. He repeatedly guides people through Omonia and attempts to motivate the residents with his stories. “Athens is the first Greek city to lose its laughter,” says Karagiannis. But the Athenians are proud.