The Full Catastrophe (29 page)

To illustrate this point, he took out a few Greek newspaper
clippings. One of the headlines, from
Kathimerini,
read “Nights of Rage at Agios Panteleimonas.” The article told the story of what happened the night of May 26, 2009, when smoke began to billow out of the church basement. Police and fire trucks arrived. A Pakistani was injured on the sidewalk, though no explanation was given as to why, and a raging mob surrounded Prokopios. “You take in the foreigners and throw the Greeks out onto the street!” yelled someone. “We’re giving you one last chance: you have one week to throw them all out!” The angry people were the “ladies and gentlemen of the committee,” Prokopios told me, and the fire in the basement had started because he was housing homeless people there, and one man’s candle fell over and set alight a mattress. The committee members, he said, were screaming: “The Muslims have come and set the church on fire!” But the man who accidentally started the fire happened to be a Greek named Nikos. At this, Maria began to giggle. Prokopios, pleased to make her laugh, tried to keep it up. “Ms. Maria,” he said, “they fell on me like dogs. You know how dogs bark? Like that. Like dogs.” Maria kept giggling, and Prokopios started making vicious dog sounds. “I stop and think, ‘Let them bark at me, our good residents.’ ”

Prokopios then added something he thought I ought to know. The foreigners saw that the residents hated them, and began to resent it. “They said, ‘We risked our lives to come here. We paid money to smugglers. We did a thousand things. Why did we come here? Because Greece has nice sun and we wanted to do sun therapy?’ ” Maria giggled. “ ‘Did we come to swim on your nice shores?’ ” Prokopios paused and added: “ ‘Why did we come here? To find a better life. Because where we were, we couldn’t live. If we could, we’d leave Greece and go somewhere else. We were forced to come here because it’s the first country we meet across the sea,’ ” he said. “So they started feeling bad, and some got mad.” They thought, “ ‘We didn’t do anything bad to you. Why do you talk to us this way?’ ”

The notion that the immigrants didn’t do anything bad to the residents directly contradicted the Committee of Residents’ account of the situation. I asked him, therefore, if he hadn’t witnessed the dreadful criminality of which they had spoken. “The criminality was with isolated incidents,” he said. “It wasn’t a general blight. We have a saying in Greece: When a mouse eats the cheese, we don’t say the mouse ate the cheese. We say the
mice
ate the cheese.” Maria giggled again.

So it was not a “reign of the fullest and worst forms of violence, crime, and all forms of delinquency?” I asked, paraphrasing the residents’ committee’s 2008 letter.

“Lies,” he said. “It’s all lies. Exaggerations. There were crimes. There were thefts. Yes, it’s a crime to go and steal one or two cans of food from a store. That’s a crime. But when you, the resident, go to where they’ve rented a house, and where there are ten or fifteen kids inside, and they’re learning the Greek language so they can communicate with the Greeks, and you gather outside and break the windows, and you break inside and throw everyone out, isn’t that a crime? What’s that?” I asked Prokopios to elaborate, and he explained that some “ladies with sensitivities” had started a Greek language school for migrants in the area. Apparently, this upset some locals.

I asked Prokopios who had closed the playground. He told me it was the Committee of Residents, because they didn’t like immigrants bringing their children there. I told him that the Committee of Residents had told me the playground had become a sleeping area for hundreds, a place of defecation and urination, of cooking and of bathing, of child prostitution and drug dealing, of staphylococcus contamination. “It’s a lie, everything that they’re saying,” Prokopios told me. Yes, he said, during the day a few hundred people would gather in the square “trying to figure out where they’d found themselves,” but at night, most migrants would disappear into overcrowded apartments, rented to them by locals, often at a
per-person nightly rate. A few dozen people without money to pay would sleep near the church doors, he said, but no one slept in the playground.

“It wasn’t a toilet?” I said.

Prokopios seemed particularly piqued by this suggestion, because, he said, the same people who made such claims “used to piss on the side of the church.” Ms. Maria giggled, and Prokopios raised his voice with a flash of irritation. “It wasn’t the foreigners, but the same people who are screaming, the residents of the area! They used to piss, and the piss used to trickle down.” He asked Maria to tell me if he was lying.

“No,” she said. “I used to clean it up.”

He then asked her if any of the migrants who slept in or next to the church ever bothered her.

“Never,” she said.

Why then, I asked Prokopios, would the Committee of Residents lie? “That’s the secret mystery,” he said, though certainly there were political reasons behind all the tumult at Agios Panteleimonas. The foreigners were used to create a fuss: “There had to be a lot of noise, so that some political groups could emerge, to be heard. They found the cause, with these issues, these big fusses, which were created without any reason.” And so Golden Dawn, which was hidden in the beginning, began to appear. One small example of this emergence, as Prokopios remembered it, occurred on a Sunday after he’d finished the liturgy. He was walking down the steps of the church when a young man approached him and gave him a Golden Dawn party newspaper. Prokopios took the newspaper, looked at it, and then replied to the young man: “Thank you very much. Take it back now.” The young man didn’t appreciate this response and insulted the cleric and his place of origin, the island of Rhodes. In response, Prokopios recounted to the young man a phrase attributed to Anacharsis, the sixth-century
B
.
C
. Scythian philosopher who migrated to Athens from
a region near the Black Sea. When one pretentious Athenian insulted Anacharsis over the comparatively lowly status of his homeland, the philosopher is said to have responded: “My country is a shame. You, however, are a shame for your country.” The Golden Dawn adherent just walked away, Prokopios recalled, adding that it was a shame to see such young people “enslave themselves” to the party. He considered the party members, full of rage and hatred, to be possessed by Satan.

My visit to Prokopios’s office was a long one. For nearly four hours, he did most of the talking, though for Maria and me, it wasn’t too much. We listened as he expounded on his tripartite theory for how neo-Nazis were able to make it into the Greek parliament. First, he said, other politicians had created them by doing a poor job. “If Greece was Sweden, if Greece was Finland, we wouldn’t have Golden Dawn.” The second reason was anger and revenge. “In the past, people used to applaud the politicians because they were giving them money to live.” The politicians said, “ ‘Take the money! Take it! Take it! Because the machine is making it and handing it out.’ ” But now, he added, “People want someone to come and whip the politicians. To beat them. To make them eat wood.” The third reason for the party’s rise, he said, was that Greece had never punished those who had collaborated with the Nazis during the World War II occupation.

Prokopios had a point. Near the end of the war and after it, the Greek government—along with its British and American backers—was more concerned with neutralizing the large communist force that had fought the Germans than it was with punishing the collaborationist “security battalions” the Greek puppet government had sponsored to fight those same communists. The security battalions, outfitted in the traditional klephtic fighter garb of
fustanellas
and pom-pom shoes, thought of themselves as nationalists and were driven by a deep hatred of the communists. The wider population regarded them as criminal gangs, and they
were violent and vicious toward civilians. The battalions’ crimes and collaboration were overlooked after the war, and in fact battalion members were seen by the Greek government and its backers as a useful counterweight to the communists’ strength. After the war, members of the security battalions easily found jobs in the newly formed National Guard or joined shadowy security organizations. When the communist resistance fighters initially laid down their weapons in 1945, the former collaborators, now sanctioned by the Greek state, took great satisfaction in going after them, and communists were subjected to a period of persecution known as the White Terror. The communist fighters eventually regrouped in the mountains and the country slid into civil war.

In 1947, when the broke British government declared it could no longer support the Greek government’s fight against the communist insurgents, U.S. president Harry S. Truman, fearful Greece and Turkey would fall under the Soviet sphere of influence, spoke to a joint session of Congress and asked lawmakers to approve 400 million dollars in economic and military aid for the two countries. In his speech, Truman acknowledged the extremism of the Greek right as well as that of the left. Yet the extremism on the right was clearly not of equal concern given the budding Cold War climate. Truman’s speech marked the beginning of the Truman Doctrine, the Cold War containment policy that often led the United States to prop up authoritarian governments in order to prevent the spread of communism. In Greece, this later meant the U.S. government backed the dictatorial Regime of the Colonels, which used the communist threat as a pretext to seize power, and tortured and imprisoned dissidents. Members of the regime had close connections to the occupation-era security battalions, and tellingly, one if its early acts was to grant battalion members pension benefits for their wartime service. The regime also banned long hair on men and short skirts on women, as well as literature deemed subversive, such as the works of Aristophanes
and Chekhov. After the dictatorship’s fall, as Greece reestablished democratic governance, its leaders were put in prison. That was where the future Golden Dawn leader, Michaloliakos, imprisoned for his post-dictatorship political activities, met the head of the fallen regime, Georgios Papadopoulos; later, when the former dictator started an ultranationalist political party—National Political Union—from prison, Michaloliakos became head of its youth section.

During my conversation with Prokopios, I had a sense that perhaps he did not quite fit into the clerical establishment. The church in Greece is seen as an intrinsically right-wing institution—many point out its ties to the military dictatorship, which embraced the mantra “Greece of Christian Greeks”—and some of its clerics deliver nationalist, anti-Semitic sermons not entirely dissimilar to Golden Dawn political speeches. Prokopios, it seemed to me, may have paid a price for standing out. He was, by ecclesiastical standards, in his professional prime. Yet, despite his bishop’s rank, he seemed to have been relegated to the hierarchical backbench. When Prokopios was moved from Agios Panteleimonas and promoted to bishop in 2009, he was assigned to serve as an assistant to Bishop Amvrosios of Kalavryta and Aigialeia, a man with a white beard comparable in length to Prokopios’s. This coupling struck some people at the time as an odd choice, because Amvrosios was known for his nationalist views, and subsequently wrote what might be considered a defense of Golden Dawn on his personal blog: “I am not able to understand how and why the ideas of Golden Dawn are subversive and why the ideas of Syriza or the Communist Party of Greece are not similarly subversive or dangerous.” Michaloliakos returned the apparent sympathy, and once listed Amvrosios as one of the “worthy” bishops of the Greek Church, placing him in the company of prelates such as Bishop Seraphim of Piraeus, who once, on a popular television talk show, said Hitler was an “instrument of global Zionism” financed by the
Rothschild family in order to make Jews leave Europe and “go to Israel to establish the new empire.”

Things predictably did not go well between Prokopios and Amvrosios, and in the falling-out, Amvrosios, on his blog, accused Prokopios of “wanting the title and the…money!” Prokopios was moved again, and became assistant to the bishop of Nikaia in the western suburb of Athens, but this appeared to be a ceremonial position. When I met Prokopios, he seemed a man underutilized, without a flock to shepherd, and trying to come to terms with this circumstance. Despite his charitable deeds at Agios Panteleimonas, he had gone from heading a large congregation to, as he put it to me, possessing “no power” and “no responsibility.” At his office on the ground floor of the dormitory, he seemed to cater primarily to four cats he’d taken in, one of which, by the time I left, had pissed on the floor.

Following the playground’s closure, one of the next actions of the Committee of Residents was to publish its own newspaper every two months:
The Voice of the Residents of Agios Panteleimonas,
a self-funded venture, Giannatou told me, devoid of any party financing. The newspapers featured pictures of rickety ships overflowing with migrants, “ships that come and go from the depths of Asia and Africa” filled with the people that will “steal wages and will force you to lock your child inside the house, to live imprisoned.” The tone was exceedingly urgent. “The country is being driven to chaos,” ran the headline of the second edition. “The secret plan of Kissinger is being implemented. The ATHENIANS are PRISONERS of FOREIGNERS.” Underneath appeared a picture of the Germans entering Athens in 1941, and next to it, a picture of Muslims in the street holding up the Koran. The text urged Greeks to resist the migrants as they had resisted the
Nazis: “Hellenes. The invader illegal immigrants are within Athens. Brothers! Keep well inside your souls the spirit of freedom. The invaders entered without resistance with the help of ethnic nihilists of our terrorized city. Hellenes! Your hearts high!” The time had come for a “counterattack,” declared the third edition, calling for “EVERYONE IN THE STREETS to defeat the tyrants of our people.” Underneath another picture of an overcrowded boat of migrants, it said: “They aren’t illegal immigrants. They are the fifth column. Among them are found trained commando-saboteurs that impersonate poor illegal immigrants, and at the right moment, they will take an order from the globalizers for enemy actions against our country.”