Today is the second anniversary of some deadly train crash here in Greece, so there were going to be a lot of planned closures and strikes and demonstrations around the country, and especially here in Athens.
We were underprepared.
We had heard that last year that the riot police had had to come in and disperse the crowds that had gathered at Syntagma Square, and that the protestors had been throwing firebombs and rocks at police. The expectation this year was that there was going to probably be about the same turnout, and therefore a similar likelihood for either side to take extreme measures.
Which is fine, until you realize you’re about six blocks from the action, on a direct line for demonstrators “leaving the scene” if things get crazy.
The morning started with us just watching the action on a live feed on Youtube. We could hear the helicopters overhead but mostly the action appeared to be confined to the square …
… until I decided to head out and see if I could find lunch. That was about the same time that the police decided to tear-gas the crowd to break it up. When I went out the door of the apartment building, the road was packed with demonstrators heading away from Syntagma Square and towards Monastiraki would be my guess — I shuffled myself into the crowd but peeled off to wander down towards our normal lunch spots (since I am currently uninvested in the Greek government’s attempts to cover up whatever happened in that train accident).
When I did finally get down to the little ped mall with the fast lunch restaurants, all of them were closed. My assumption was that they didn’t want to risk any incidents with the demonstrators — I know the French ones, for instance, like smashing up windows — but it’s also possible they might themselves have been in the protest.
I had left H back at the apartment and she was still watching, and when she relayed that some of the riot police were following demonstrators down various escape avenues, I decided to head back and see what we could scare up out of the stuff we had in the apartment. It wasn’t much, but we managed to cobble together a little picnic.
Throughout the afternoon we’d hear helicopters or bangs (presumably from molotov cocktails) but as it got dark, the noise sort of subsided, so I decided to take the chance and go see if anything might have reopened after the demonstration had ended for the day. (We needed soda mostly.) Most everything was still closed — our burger shop, our main grocery store, most of the corner kiosks, all the little food spots. I think I saw one gelato shop open, one souvlaki place, maybe. The roads were empty and there was a few pockets of people here and there — a cluster of cops with nothing to do on one corner, a handful of tourists trying to figure out where they were going to get dinner on another.
I finally found a kiosk that was open down by Monastiraki Square and bought sodas, at least, and then the secondary grocery store was also open, so as a last resort I bought some spaghetti and some more snacks. (It was funny to see tourists in there, trying to source a meal, with a packet of cubed ham and a yogurt container.) As I continued my wander around, I also found that the little pizzette place around the corner was open and so I took back pizza as well.
It’s funny to think that the big Carnival celebrations will start tomorrow, after there was such conflict today. The cleaning crew trucks were about the only things on the road, so I guess everything will be tidied up by parade time.