Streets Of Athens Research Articles

The “Transnational Business of Death” Among Somali Migrants in the Streets of Athens

Abstract Migrants risk their lives when venturing out on hazardous journeys to escape unbearable situations in their countries of origin. Some, unfortunately, lose their lives en route. When such tragedies happen, a border-crossing social network of brokers, fellow travelers, family members, and friends of the deceased engage in a “transnational business of death” involving exchanges of money, things, information, and rumors. Based on ethnographic fieldwork among Somali women and men from 2013 to 2016, this article explores how the death of one Somali woman was dealt with on a particular street in Athens, Greece. The article argues that an informal economy arises as a reaction to the lack of legal, formal support from the Greek nation-state when it comes to dealing with the deaths of loved ones among undocumented migrants.

Ghosts in the streets of Athens: Ghostlore and social media

Ghostlore or ghost-lore is, in short, a subgenre of folklore that focuses on ghostly tales which can be found in both pre-industrial and contemporary contexts. The majority of these stories are connected to houses and other buildings that are either dilapidated or inhabited but can be described mainly as private places. Due to the nature of public places -whether they are connected to people?s experiences or could be described as non-places- it is odd to ?find? ghosts there, as it is odd to ?find? them in parks or streets. However, they remain social places open to multiple interpretations and symbolisms. Through pertinent online entries, mostly uploaded by groups describing their practices as ?investigating? the paranormal or the occult, this paper aims to discuss the connection between ghost-lore and public places, mainly from the city of Athens. Furthermore, a very important aspect demonstrating the effectiveness of these online entries are the comments made by the netizens following these ?investigations?, which result in the formation of new groups. These groups are created online, but are driven by a common interest in ghosts in the offline world. Thus, in order to study how the physical public space is being reinterpreted in light of the supernatural, the paper intends to approach the digital public space of social media.

Walk the Wall Athens: An Experiential Walk in the City

Athens is a historic capital widely known for its legacy left to Western civilization and its publicly recognized and well-studied monuments of world heritage. But what do we really know about the Athenian antiquities that have been integrated into the city’s modern canvas? In how many ways can the urban landscape of Athens be re-introduced to the modern traveler? Walk the Wall Athens is a bilingual mobile application that allows the user to wander, literally and metaphorically, through the streets of Athens in order to explore the traces of the Themistoclean city wall and to recover this important monument from oblivion. Just as the ancient city wall surrounds Athens as a historical chain that crosses all the neighbourhoods of the modern city’s historical centre, the route provided by the interactive map of the application introduces the visitor to the layout of the modern Athenian metropolis. Through a walk on the remains of the ancient fortification, the application Walk the Wall Athens attempts to spark the interest and excite the curiosity of the Athenian traveller of the 21st century, introducing him to a journey of 2,500 years of history.

Care for the Other: Lessons from the streets of Athens

Austerity in Greece resulted in poverty, political and social turmoil and intense debates about collective identities, citizenship and the future. One of the main arguments has been that the Greeks should re-evaluate their relationship with the past and their over-reliance on national narratives. The task of re-evaluation can only be accomplished in the public spheres of politics and culture, where individual and collective voices gradually transform the imaginary significations that animate the social body. One such voice is Rhea Galanaki, a novelist with a long and distinguished presence in Greek and European literature. The present article draws on her 2015 novel I Akra Tapeinosi (The Utter Humiliation) in order to flesh out a feminist political vision for the future. This vision draws inspiration from women’s struggles against patriarchy in past decades, and resonates with the concepts of vulnerability and care, contributing to thinking a compassionate alternative to the politics of despair within and beyond the Greek borders.

“Who Really Rules this Country?” Collusion between State and Deep State in Post–Civil War Greece and the Murder of Independent MP Grigorios Lambrakis, 1958–1963

ABSTRACTThe destruction of Greek democracy did not happen suddenly on 21 April 1967 with tanks rolling down the streets of Athens. Its undermining had been underway from at least 1958 after the electoral revival of the Left spread panic throughout the conservative establishment, and the State and Deep State entered into a tacit alliance to counter its presumed threat. Two important milestones in this process were the elections of “violence and fraud” of October 1961 and the assassination of MP Grigorios Lambrakis in May 1963. This analysis illustrates how the imperative to fight the Cold War put a brake on the punishment of Greek collaborators and encouraged a phenomenon of para-militarism thoroughly incompatible with normal definitions of Western legality and democracy.

Street art conservation in Athens: Critical conservation in a time of crisis

Street art, public murals, and graffiti are forms of contemporary art which flourish in the urban environment. The current socioeconomic and political crisis in Greece has rendered Athens a living city canvas that attracts artists, art lovers, young people, tourists, journalists, and photographers. The conservation of street art in extreme outdoor conditions is a new area of interest for conservation research and practice. Since 2010 the Conservation of Wall Paintings Laboratory of the Department of Conservation of Antiquities and Works of Art (CAWA) of the Technological Educational Institute (TEI), Athens has been engaged in a project to explore ethics, carry out documentation, and initiate new research into street art and its conservation. Since 2012, Street Art Conservators (St.a.co.), a team comprising academics, conservators, and students from CAWA has worked in the streets of Athens for the preservation of street art. The protection and conservation of street art require the creation of a critical mass of people who are interested in the study and preservation of street art, co-operative conservation work and research, and the documentation and digital mapping of street art as an alternative means for its preservation.

Hannah Arendt in the streets of Athens

Athens for some time now has been an important site for civic protest. From the December 2008 ‘riots’ to the Indignant protests and after the streets of Athens have been flaring up in scenes of turmoil and dissent. This article sheds light on a particular moment of this continuous political upheaval, the 2011 Aganaktismenoi movement that grew massively and disappeared into thin air in all but a few months. These political phenomena are approached by deploying Arendt’s method of hermeneutic phenomenology and by trying to understand these events through a narrative analysis of participants’ stories. Among others, this analysis reveals an emptiness of political narratives (words) that did not correspond with the newness of the political actions (deeds) and allegedly created obstacles for political newness to enter the world of old politics or post-politics. Judging it from the present, political newness as the major political promise of the Syntagma Square occupation did not materialize within the framework of contemporary (democratic) formal politics. Instead, through the passage of time, politics proper found different ways to become enacted through the emergence of a solidarity movement, but also regrettably, through the unimaginable rise of an extreme far-right.

Ten theses on touch, or, writing touch

This performative text engages with a writing of haptics by offering 10 theses on touch. This writing exercise that seeks to philosophize the feel, to paraphrase Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, comes to understand itself as a performance of touching rather than a text about touching. Each of the 10 separate theses/touches can be read independently and in any order while also creating a whole through their proximity. The passages presented touch upon each other in order to create a performative instantiation of Jacques Rancière's notion of a “distribution of the sensible.” This distribution of the sensible and the gaps therein emerge from different times, spaces, political and aesthetic practices that include yet are not limited to the tear gas sweating streets of Athens touching Caribbean dance practices touching Audre Lorde's erotics touching Max's Kansas City touching queer commons touching anarchist love letters. To trace these practices, temporalities, resistances is to touch the constant trembling oscillation of subject and object.

Action research with children and adolescents working on the streets of Athens, Greece

In fieldwork with children and adolescents working on the streets of Athens, Greece, the authors applied a multidisciplinary methodology, through which participants were empowered to articulate their own voice. This article discusses some indicant themes which emerged through participants' narrations and through their active engagement in Theatre-for-Development: (1) the role of family attachment and social networks promoting the continuity of children's cultural identity; (2) their perception of working on the streets as a vital need to contribute to family income; and (3) the way young subjects resituated themselves both in their relation with the mainstream culture and within their own culture.

Beyond Spontaneity

This article argues for the analytical potentials of the concept of spontaneity in our effort to understand critically the socio-spatial dynamics of Athens, but especially the contemporary collective protest actions in the city. Such critical understanding emerges as a significant task given the current urgency to grasp the capitalist crisis and the collective reactions to it. However, taking into account the re-configuration of extreme-Right violence in the streets of Athens, the article attempts to revisit the Marxist dichotomy between spontaneity and non-spontaneity. Via an anthropological critique of this distinction, the paper suggests an additional point of focus beyond spontaneity.

The economic crisis seen from the everyday

The proliferating numbers of a new population of urban poor in the Western world—who I call here nouveau poor—is a phenomenon equally (if not more) significant as the emergence of the Indignados and Occupy movements, and calls for urgent attention from the part of critical urban studies. This phenomenon forces us to re-evaluate the analytical categories within which we study urban poverty (gender, age, ethnicity, marginality, etc.) and prompts us to focus on commonality, rather than difference, when it comes to collectively reclaiming the ‘right to the city’. Focusing on the political, social and affective consequences of the presence of nouveau poor on the streets of Athens, I argue that the shock waves that Greece's nouveau poor send down Europe's spine are partly due to the fact that Athens' new ranks of beggars are not migrants, junkies, alcoholics or homeless; they do not fall in any of the familiar categories of the urban ‘other’ or ‘subaltern’. As they belonged, until very recently, to the mainstream aspiring middle classes, it is very difficult, if not impossible, to ‘other’ them, ignore them or dismiss them politically, or socially. The presence of Europe's very own ranks of middle class-come-poor begs for a reconceptualisation of the link between urban theory and praxis.

The Machine that Would Predict the Future

Photograph by Dan Saelinger In the summer and fall of last year, the Greek financial crisis tore at the seams of the global economy. Having run up a debt that it would never be able to repay, the country faced a number of potential outcomes, all unpleasant. Efforts to slash spending spurred riots in the streets of Athens, while threats of default rattled global financial markets. Many economists argued that Greece should leave the euro zone and devalue its currency, a move that would in theory help the economy grow. “Make no mistake: an orderly euro exit will be hard,” wrote New York University economist Nouriel Roubini in the Financial Times. “But watching the slow disorderly implosion of the Greek economy and society will be much worse.”

Chaotic communication

This paper reports how European researchers were able to use the chaos phenomenon to send digital messages at gigabit per second speeds over 115 km of commercial optical fiber beneath the streets of Athens, Greece. A distinct advantage of chaotic communication is that it is often easier to generate robust, high-power chaotic signals than conventional ones. A chaotic signal is also harder for an eavesdropper to identify because it is difficult to distinguish from background noise.

The Savior

Back to table of contents Previous article Next article IntrospectionsFull AccessThe SaviorRichard G. Druss, M.D.Richard G. DrussSearch for more papers by this author, M.D.Published Online:1 Dec 2004https://doi.org/10.1176/appi.ajp.161.12.2179AboutSectionsPDF/EPUB ToolsAdd to favoritesDownload CitationsTrack Citations ShareShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InEmail “He lifted me from the dung heaps,” said Ms. Brent (not her real name), referring to her former therapist. She said that she had grown up in a series of foster homes and that her life had been empty and meaningless until she began her 5-year psychotherapy with Dr. Moses Keviac (his name is disguised). She annunciated his name with adoration and reverence. “I would have stayed on with him forever.” He had helped her so much that at long last she was able to finish her schooling. But now she was stalled and had not used her degree to get a paying job. She was being supported by a small trust fund from her grandmother.Ms. Brent was an intelligent woman of 30. She told me that she had been in the process of looking for her first job when Dr. Keviac had suddenly announced that he would be relocating to the West Coast in 3 months.“I was devastated,” she said. “You are the fourth psychiatrist I have seen since he left; I have been trying to find a worthy successor to him.” At this point, she began to weep. “I’m not sure there is anyone who can fill those shoes.”I had met Dr. Keviac at psychoanalytic meetings, and he was indeed a most charismatic man. It was 1980, and I was a very junior member of the faculty.“I’m really desperate, and I worry that I will slip back to where I was without his sessions to energize me.”“They are big shoes to fill,” I told her, “but I’d like to give it a try,” and I set up a second appointment with her 1 week hence. She called the next day and said that although she thought I was very able, she would really like to give someone else a try. I wished her good luck, suddenly having a vision of Diogenes wandering about the streets of Athens with his lamp, looking for the one honest man.About a month later, I was at a meeting when Dr. John Weber, a senior psychiatrist, came over to me.“Hello, Dick. How are you? I have to say that I was next in line after Ms. Brent saw you.”“What did you think?” I asked.“I saw her just once also. Neither of us could re-create that idealizing transference that she had with Moses.”“What do you figure happened?”“That’s what I wanted to tell you: a follow-up,” he said. “I sent her my bill for the consultation. After a few weeks, I got a check from her. The envelope was postmarked from the West Coast. I’ll bet she moved out there to be with Moses.”“My gosh,” I said.This experience reinforced and consolidated a point of view that I feel even more strongly about today than I did then: Psychotherapy should never become a substitute for life. If it does, we are doing something very wrong. Insight psychotherapy or psychoanalysis should always be a running commentary on the patient’s life—a serious, very important commentary—but not a substitute for life. If it does become a substitute, you are carrying out the wrong treatment for the patient.Surely, Dr. Keviac should not have dropped this patient with such short notice. If a new position took him to the West Coast so suddenly, he should have spent enough time commuting bicoastally to wean his more needy and dependent patients. He should have arranged a personal referral for Ms. Brent with his blessing and perhaps had a few weeks of overlapping treatment.But most of all, he should have been helping her build other nonpsychiatric connections—to her work, to other people, to her church, and to her community. He allowed himself to become her savior and then left her, alone, to face the world. He permitted a situation to develop in which he was the only one who could feed her and then withdrew the breast before she had learned to feed herself.Our profession needs fewer saviors and more healers.Address reprint requests to Dr. Druss, 180 East End Ave., New York, NY 10128. FiguresReferencesCited byDetailsCited byNone Volume 161Issue 12 December 2004Pages 2179-2180 Metrics PDF download History Published online 1 December 2004 Published in print 1 December 2004

Biomonitoring of concentrations of platinum group elements and their correlations to other metals

Biomonitoring of Pt, Pd, Pb, Mn, Cu, Fe and Zn was conducted using leaves (two and six months old) of laurel (Laurus nobilis L.) ornamental shrubs grown in 14 sampling sites located on the central green belts of six avenues and streets of Athens. In this biomonitoring, we determined, for the first time in Greece, the concentrations of the new urban "pollutants" Pt and Pd, and we estimated the correlations among the concentrations of all the above-mentioned metals as well as among the metal concentrations and the traffic load. Cluster analysis and principal component analysis (PCA) of the data revealed three distinct groups of metals and two groups of sites (one with high and the other with relatively low levels of pollution). Using varimax-rotated PCA for the metals, four factors were extracted explaining 92.3% of the total shared variance, which are further discussed. The importance of seasonal timing of sampling is revealed by the data and discussed in connection with the meteorological conditions.

Advertising: the Magic System

Advertising: the Magic System Raymond Williams (bio) Williams, Raymond. 1980. Advertising: The magic system. In Problems in Materialism and Culture. London: Verso, 170–195. Reprinted with the permission of the author’s estate. 1. History It is customary to begin even the shortest account of the history of advertising by recalling the three thousand year old papyrus from Thebes, offering a reward for a runaway slave, and to go on to such recollections as the crier in the streets of Athens, the paintings of gladiators, with sentences urging attendance at their combats, in ruined Pompeii, and the fly-bills on the pillars of the Forum in Rome. This pleasant little ritual can be quickly performed, and as quickly forgotten: it is, of course, altogether too modest. If by advertising we mean what was meant by Shakespeare and the translators of the Authorized Version — the process of taking or giving notice of something — it is as old as human society, and some pleasant recollections from the Stone Age could be quite easily devised. The real business of the historian of advertising is more difficult: to trace the development from processes of specific attention and information to an institutionalized system of commercial information and persuasion; to relate this to changes in society and in the economy: and to trace changes in method in the context of changing organizations and intentions. The spreading of information, by the crier or by handwritten and printed broadsheets, is known from all periods of English society. The first signs of anything more organized come in the seventeeth century, with the development of newsbooks, mercuries, and newspapers. Already certain places, such as St. Paul’s in London, were recognized as centres for the posting of specific bills, and the extension of such posting to the new printed publications was a natural development. The material of such advertisements ranged from offers and wants in personal service, notices of the publications of books, and details of runaway servants, apprentices, horses and dogs, to announcements of new commodities available at particular shops, enthusiastic announcements of remedies and specifics, and notices of the public showing of monsters, prodigies, and freaks. While the majority were the simple, basically factual and specific notices we now call ‘classified’, there were also direct recommendations, as here, from 1658: That Excellent, and by all Physicians, approved China drink, called by the Chineans Tcha, by other nations Tay alias Tee, is sold at the Sultaness Head Cophee-House in Sweeting’s Rents, by the Royal Exchange, London. Mention of the physicians begins that process of extension from the conventional recommendations of books as ‘excellent’ or ‘advmirable’ and the conventional adjectives which soon became part of the noun, in a given context (as in my native village, every dance is a Grand Dance). The most extravagant early extension s were in the field of medicines, and it was noted in 1652, of the writers of copy in new-books: There is never a moutebank who, either by professing of chymistry or any other art drains money from the people of the nation but these arch-cheats have a share in the booty — because the fellow cannot lye sufficiently himself he gets one of these to do’t for him. Looking up, in the 1950’s, from the British Dental Association’s complaints of misleading television advertising of toothpastes, we can recognize the advertisement, in 1660, of a ‘most Excellent and Approved Dentrifice’, which not only makes the teeth ‘white as Ivory’, but being constantly used, the Parties using it are never troubled with the Tooth-ache. It fastens the Teeth, sweetens the Breath, and preserves the Gums and Mouth from Cankers and Imposthumes. Moreover the right are onely to be had at Thomas Rookes, Stationer, at the Holy Lamb at the east end of St. Paul’s Church, near the School, in sealed papers at 12d the paper. In the year of the Plague, London was full of SOVEREIGN Cordials against the Corruption of the Air. These did not exactly succeed, but a long and profitable trade, and certain means of promoting it, were now firmly established. With the major growth of newspapers, from the 1690s, the volume of...

Easter in Greece

In Greece Easter is the time for family reunions and the giving of presents rather than at Christmas. Two weeks before the festival coloured eggs, filled with sweets, appeared in the shops and there was great buying of cards and presents. On the Tuesday and Thursday before Easter people hard-boiled and coloured a large number of eggs. One evening during Holy Week as we walked along the busy streets of Athens we noticed that in every church we passed and in this city there are countless churches, many of great antiquity services were in progress. The interiors were brilliantly lighted, though frequently glass chandeliers, Icons and other ornaments were shrouded in black or purple crepe. On the night of Good Friday we were among the large crowd outside a local church in one of the suburbs. The west facade was outlined by electric lights and people passed up and down the entrance steps incessantly. Many in the crowd, ourselves included, held lighted yellow or white candles. Our friends' four-year-old son who accompanied us grasped a long white candle tied with blue ribbons, the Easter colour, given him by his Godmother. On the balconies and in the open windows of surrounding houses were placed many candles and Chinese lanterns. At last a procession issued from the church and started on its way round the parish, those following behind carrying lighted candles. Headed by banners and big candles in glass lanterns a large black wooden Crucifix with a candle on either arm and on top next appeared. Then cantors intoning chants which were taken up by the crowd, were followed by priests in vestments, wearing their tall, rimless black hats. Finally, a huge 'Epitaphius' 269

A Note on Aristophanes, Lysistrata 665–70

The possibility that the Greeks used heraldic symbols or blazons was first explored a long time ago. The question has been revived recently by a French scholar in an article entitled ‘Les “blazons” des villes grecques’. It is of wide general interest, and of particular interest to numismatists who are concerned with the curious group of coins of Euboic standard bearing various simple devices (horse, horse protome and hindquarters, wheel, triskeles, beetle, gorgoneion, etc.), sometimes placed within what appears to be the circle of a shield. Various scholars, including C. T. Seltman, ascribed these coins to sixth-century Athens; Seltman's particular contribution to the problem of their identification consisted in the explanation of the diverse anepigraphic types of this group of coins as the ‘heraldic’ devices or blazons of the great gene or noble houses of early Athens. In particular he pointed out that the same devices appeared also in Attic black-figured vases on the shields of deities, heroes, and unidentified hoplites, and proposed the theory that the vase-painters were copying what they saw in the streets of Athens, namely the shield-devices of the men-at-arms of Athens' leading families.