Exarcheia, Athens

Exarcheia is the neighbourhood of central Athens that houses the Polytechneio, the university where the students conducted their uprising against the fascist dictatorship in November 1973. It was violently suppressed.

When the junta fell, university campuses were declared off-limits to police. With the Polytechneio as a safe asylum, Exarcheia became home to anti-authoritarian actions of varying character and quality, from targeted resistance against a system that's destroying humanity to wealthy youngsters coming in from outside to star in their own Instagram stories, burning the motorcycles of people who could not afford to replace them, and torching the small businesses of people who lost everything.

The university asylum law was revoked in 2019, making it more difficult for rioters to escape from the police, or easier to repress legitimate protest, depending on how you see it. The weapon of "alternative" marketing was turned against the neighbourhood. Post-crisis real estate prices meant absentee landlords could pick off apartments like eating chips. Whole buildings disappeared into boutique apartment complexes, many of which mysteriously remain empty. The inhabitants were priced out.

Over time the Instagrammers have had less and less "uprising" to use as content. Recently we watched a fifteen-year old tourist set fire with her lighter to a plastic net hung over a building being renovated. After her little group had finished excitedly filming this conflagration on their phones a resident casually emptied her bottle of water over it on her way in. The next week a bunch of graffiti types from Pireaus came to film themselves with expensive kit, spraying the same building with their own names. They had exactly the same manufactured air of media-friendly edginess as the girl.

On the surface things don't look good, but the best thing about Exarcheia is that it's not all surface. Once the pretenders have left the playground, and you've got the art of seeing the riot police standing around the square like a mis-planted copse of trees, there really is a village (or "villatz") underneath. It consists of the girl who put out the fire with a bored sigh, the huge bouncer who got the graffiti boys to turn their annoying music down, and the itinerant street vendor who attempted to sell them battery-powered disco lights, ruining their footage in the process (they didn't purchase). And of course the independent bookshops.

I didn't want to move here, I married in. There's layers and layers of fakery, maliciousness, posing and fraud, but Exarcheia is not dead. Having grown up in a city that capital killed off long ago, I can see the difference, and it's a responsibility for everyone who lives here. Unsettled and unsettling, undermined from within and without, it hasn't given up. Its struggles may be absurd, noble, doomed, or misguided, but it has heart.

I'd like it if there was a murder mystery series set here.