The hill
I think this scene is worth recording, if only for posterity. The changes happening in this city will one day come to feel normal. We’ll forget, because the cops told made us delete our photos, and we’ll enjoy the park. We will think only sometimes it’s a shame there are security cameras and security guards in the park and that if a crisis happens again this is one less place where newly unhoused people can sleep.
In the mornings, we take our little dog up the hill by our apartment. Sometimes Dom and I go up there together, sometimes we take it in turns. This morning it was I who took him. This morning it was cooler than usual, there was a slight breeze and an immaculate, gleaming, arrogant sky. A day for falling in love or spotting a tortoise (six of whom live in the park!).
Sock the dog loves the hill as much as I do. The other dogs, big frisky ones, play on the basketball court and Sock kisses them through the chain link fence, but he’s too little, or too young, to play with them (this we learned the hard way). He has made friends with some of the smaller dogs up there, namely Rumiki, a tolerant old girl who lets him follow her around, copy her, sniff and kiss her. No-one has ever regretted getting up an hour early to take a tiny dog up a wild hill.
The hill in summer reminds me of Australia in February. Like those scrubby parks out in the suburbs and country towns. Maybe that’s why I like it. The grass is the colour of hay and the trees, eucalypts and pines mostly, planted a hundred years ago, are tall and shady. There are wood-chips and pale stone tiles forming pathways through the scrub. There is an amphitheater and a lookout. Although you’re in the middle of the densest city in Europe, you hear that insect buzz more strongly than the machine noises of human society. Human society is present, everywhere, in the park—graffiti, litter, the odd pile of human shit. It was, for a time, a more menacing place, more drug use by desperate people, more theft, more of a sense I wouldn’t spend time there alone towards the end of the day or early in the morning. The government removed those people by force. I don’t want to forget that.
Since we came back to Athens in 2020 and stayed, the hill has become my favourite place. It was somewhere to go during lockdown. It was somewhere we did socially distant gatherings in the amphitheater and where we improvised a little rave on the paved part of the peak. It’s where thousands of us gathered in protest against the park’s privatisation.
This morning there were a dozen protestors on the hill and over a hundred cops with weapons “observing” them. The private development is due to begin this month, a month when most Athenians escape the heat and go to their εξοχικό (village house) or camp on an island beach. The park needs some renovations. The toilets are walled-up. The kids’ playground is broken and unsafe. One side of the hill is just gravel, and every time I walk down it I slide onto my ass in exactly the same spot. Being Australian, though, I know what is repressed in order for a city to look pristine. And there are many ways to renovate a park without privatising it.
The goal of all governments is to produce a compliant public, and the quickest way to do that is to remove the problem of people who don’t comply. Fascists do this by murdering the problem people, the nonconformists and people marked in some way by an intolerable difference. Neoliberals do it by enforcing consumerism, destroying independent publics that organise around activities other than trade, and pushing out the unwanteds—those who can’t or won’t consume in the mandated ways—into silent, forgotten areas, the boon-docks, so far out and in such deprived contexts their isolation from one another completes itself. In this way they are disarmed. This has happened already in Melbourne, and not because the yuppies moved in. That was an effect, a desired effect, but not the cause.
Watching neoliberalism happen like this, in real time, “neoliberalism on steroids,” is highly disturbing. Evidence, if anyone needed it, that neoliberalism is not the free and natural exchange of goods and services, but a process that requires the collusion of the state, capital, and realtors to, first, violently extract a resource from the public who owns that resource—collectively and by divine right!—and then sell it back to them under such degraded terms that they might as well have poured concrete over our eyes.
I walked with Sock to the peak of the hill, past fifty, sixty cops, towards the point where you can look out over the city, the Akropolis, the Aegean. Athens is not a beautiful city, but from above everything looks serene. I sat down on the ledge and took a photo of the row of cops who were following the protestors round the hill, and sent the photo to a friend. It’s perfectly legal to do this. Public place, adults doing their job, it’s covered by the law. A cop shouted at me to not photograph them and to delete the photo. I said ok and pretended to bleep-bloop in my phone. I was scared he would come over and see I’d already sent the photo into the world, and then what? That officer walked round the corner of a boulder, closer to the protestors.
Then a man—civilian—came up the hill with his big black labrador cross. He sat by me and we cooed as our dogs sniffed and licked one another. He surreptitiously took a photo of the cops on his phone. This time an older cop—large, bald, red-faced—shouted at him. The man with the dog said ok, got up and started walking back down the hill. The blundering, mean-looking cop chased after him and some younger cops followed. He stood over the man with the dog to make sure he deleted the photo he had taken. He then made the man with the dog give his id card over and took it to the throng of police officers, some of whom snapped it with their phones. My heart was racing. I was afraid for this person, and afraid for me. I didn’t have my id card on me, just a tiny shoulder bag with my phone and some doggy poo bags and treats. I felt, suddenly and acutely, very alone, very vulnerable. There was press on the hill, three of four journalists, there was the man with the black lab, there were a dozen protesters just outside my field of vision. Collectively we constituted the public of the public park. Against us was more than one hundred armed police, all men, all with a cultivated aggression and machismo. I held my puppy in my arms and walked quickly down the hill. I let Sock down to the ground and he jumped down the steps of the hill for the first time (I can’t tell you how small he is, he is so small). It’s impossible to not smile and feel parental pride when my tiny pup does something new, and I did, and I also felt doom setting in. I heard a cop call after me and I kept walking. On my way down the hill I saw three more throngs of them encroaching on the park, twelve, thirteen, fourteen of them per battalion. Their walkie talkies crackled as I passed them, me looking at the pavement, and I was afraid one of them would stop me, take my phone. A few of them called out to my puppy and I pulled anxiously on his leash.
I found myself back on Kallidromiou, where people were on the street talking on their phones, walking to their bus stops, waiters were setting up cafes and shopkeepers rearranging food and supplies. I wanted to tell everyone to stop what they were doing and march up the hill. But I didn’t want to go back up. It works—terrorising people with a constant and overwhelming presence of armed police. It makes you paranoid. I won’t even post the photo I took (legally!) on the hill, because what if it comes between me and my visa? It works—violence, intimidation.
I haven’t written much about Athens because moving here destabilised my perspective. Before, I operated with the confidence of a local in the place of my birth; when I described, I knew that my perspective, even if others came to critique it, was informed by a lifetime of observation in and through my mother tongue. I was one of what I observed. Being a new foreigner throws you from that security. There’s always the fear that you’re missing something crucial, and if you write it down you’ll expose your naiveté or grandiosity. I sometimes read Anglophone writing about Athens and I see in it exaggeration or romance. While I prefer grandiosity to cynicism or minimalism, accuracy has a longer life-span. Faced with an inability to describe what’s in front of you (powers of description being all you really have as a writer), I wonder if I’ve lost it, whatever I thought I had. And then the deeper concern, much truer, that none of the writing in the world, none of the theory or connection or insight it has facilitated has ever been more powerful than a throng of mean cops who for some reason really love privatising public hills.
But just as I felt compelled to send my photo to my friend as soon as I took it (welcome to Greece, she responded), I think this scene is worth recording, if only for posterity. Put into words a moment before it disappears forever.
Sorry this letter has no jokes!!!
Ellena