Defend the Squatted Community of Prosfygika!
Prosfygika is a neighbourhood of 8 housing blocks on Alexandra avenue in the heart of Athens. It is currently home to over 400 people with very diverse backgrounds and histories. Its situation in the city is peculiar as it stands between the Supreme Court and the Police Headquarters, next to the main oncology hospital and in front of Panathinaikos football stadium. Many inhabitants are refugees fleeing armed conflicts and state repression in Western Asia and elsewhere. It is the place where many could reunite their families to live together in relative safety after years of persecution. Other inhabitants are from vulnerable groups such as the elderly, people with various health issues and others who have already been excluded from Athens’ ever-worsening housing market.
Having been a neglected and ghettoised area for a long period, despite its central location, inhabitants managed to resist various attempts to free up the buildings from demolition throughout the 2000s. Over the past 16 years, most inhabitants of the neighbourhood have organised themselves into a united community, with 22 autonomous structures serving the needs not only of the people living within the neighbourhood but also of people from the surrounding areas and city. These include women’s and children’s spaces, bakery and food distribution, healthcare, culture and education, as well as structures for self-defence and the preservation and maintenance of the community’s built and cultural heritage. Since 2025, a separate structure has been created to host patients and their relatives arriving from all over Greece at the oncology hospital next door.
In the early 2000s, an attempt to build a shopping mall on the plot was also prevented through listing the blocks as historic monument. Many architects and engineers, as well as academics supported the listing of the 8 buildings and helped prevent their demolition. On the one hand, the blocks might seem trivial today, but built in the 30s they are a landmark of modernist housing architecture in Greece and an account of the history of Greece. Prosfygika, meaning “refugee settlement”, the blocks were originally built as housing for ethnic Greek refugees from Asia Minor. Since then, the neighbourhood housed multiple waves of refugees, exiles, militants and marginalised people of Athens. Bullet holes from the December 1944 conflict that predated the Greek Civil War (1946-1949) are still exposed on its facades. The Community has consciously built a strong awareness of the historic value of the buildings, and last year, a self-organised restoration project was launched. The project is financed by its own resources as well as international donations.
Imminent danger of eviction and hunger strike
Prosfygika is once again under threat of eviction. Last year, the regional government of Attica announced an urban renewal project for the neighbourhood, meaning to evict its inhabitants and make it available for private investment to build “social housing”, what an hypocrisy for a country that has no social housing at all until today. As a reaction, on the 5th of February, community member Aristotelis Chantzis started a hunger strike until death, stating: “Because we know that if Prosfygika is evacuated, a lot of us will end up on the streets. (…) Based on this collective decision to defend ourselves, I have voluntarily decided to go on a hunger strike to the death, with the utmost respect for life.” His demands are as simple as the immediate cancellation of the redevelopment project by the Region of Attica, that all actual residents be allowed to remain in the squatted neighbourhood, the provision of guarantees that the restoration will be provided by a legal entity that represents Prosfygika’s actual squatted community without any public funds.
There is no concrete date of eviction, but for Aristotelis there is not much time left to cancel the project. He passed the 75th day of the hunger strike and is now in a critical condition. Other comrades do symbolic hungerstrikes in support of Aristotelis Chantzis for a shorter period, and solidarity messages and actions are held worldwide. As European Action Coalition, our groups from Greece (Athens and Thessaloniki) and Cyprus all concentrated their actions and discussions for the HAD around the defense of Prosfygika and in support of Aristotelis Chantzis.
As stated in a recent call in support for Prosfygika: “Let’s not wait for Aristotelis Chantzis’s funeral, let’s not wait for Prosfygika to be evicted, let’s not even wait for those damned signatures to be signed for the handover of Prosfygika to contractors. Let’s attack now, let’s win now”.
Until now, the Region of Attica has not reacted to Aristotelis Chantzis’s health situation despite the serious health damage caused by the 75 days of hunger strike, nor to the massive protests that have been held the last weeks gathering thousands of people and blocking the central streets of the city.
Greece and the EU: murderers
Between ignorance and criminalisation under the Syriza government, the squatting scene offered massive support to refugees during and after the so-called “refugee crisis”, basically providing a significant part of the humanitarian infrastructure in Athens, without recognition and facing lots of repression (i.e. comrades from Koukaki’s squat risk years of prison on a trial on the 30th of April because of resisting eviction). After 2019, the New Democracy government started a massive eviction campaign, and only a few squats survived until today. There is no doubt that, beyond the capitalist interest in de facto privatising and gentrifying the neighbourhood, there is also a much deeper motivation in evicting Prosfygika. Buildings, the community, resistance: everything about it is antithetical to the neoliberal Disney-Land the current government envisions for the city of Athens.
All this happens at a time when the EU is planning to copy the worst practices from the US by creating an ICE-like deportation police and programme. At a time when this year we have already passed 700 deaths at the EU southern borders. At a time when people keep fleeing wars that we are very much engaged in. At a time when the EU pretends to solve the housing problem with its so-called EU Housing Affordable Plan but the only thing it does is giving money to the private real estate sector. And last but not least, at a time when in Athens, like in most European cities, housing is becoming unavailable to most of us, and people among us are dying on the streets.
Prosfyigika cannot be disconnected from all these struggles altogether, and so it concerns us all!In Europe and elsewhere, self-organised communities are part of the solution, not of the problem.
We, members of the European Action Coalition, stand with the Community of Squatted Prosfygika against any attack by the authorities, let alone an eviction! We demand that the Government of Attica immediately halt the urban renewal project. We call for active opposition to the plans on all levels, from the streets to institutions.
Stop all evictions, stop homelessness, stop all repression against asylum seekers! Defend Prosfygika!
Read more on the Community of Squatted Profygika in Athens here.
