Exarcheia – Dark Nights

Athens, Greece: Claim for the commando attack on the OPKE team at Strefi Hill in Exarcheia on 1/11/2025

Posted on 2025/11/25 - 2025/11/25 by darknights

<<MIND THE STAIRS>>

A year and a day after comrade and armed anarchist fighter Kyriakos Xymitiris was killed in an apartment on Arcadia Street, following a premature bomb explosion, he was destined to remind everyone that social peace is nothing more than empty words in an empty space.

Along with the explosion, a promise was made. That the comrade would not be forgotten. The comrade has not been forgotten. His name became a slogan on the lips of thousands. Then it adorned walls, was written in texts and was the subject of events. However, it was not long before this name became a signature. The name of the fallen anarchist guerrilla Kyriakos ceased to belong exclusively to him. Conspirators met and nuclei were formed with his name. Commandos slipped away in the night and in the shadows in order to give light and noise to the quiet monotony of the metropolis. Going along this path, we decided to carry out a raid on the cops who have taken up camp on Strefi Hill.

We struck in broad daylight, reminding the uniformed bastards that they will never be in peace amid us even for a moment. In recent years, there has been an effort to turn the Exarcheia neighbourhood into a well-guarded alternative resort, where tourists enjoy the aesthetics of the “subculture” and the unconventional character of the neighbourhood without actually contributing in the slightest to the Cause and the goals for which we are fighting. Seeing what is happening before our eyes, we choose not to stand by as observers. We choose direct action, militantly defending our projects and ideas in the here and now. The Exarcheia you dream of will turn into your worst nightmares.

PS: We were saddened about the absence of the riot police as we really wanted to see them running after what happened the previous night, during the memorial march and more generally in the neighbourhood. On the other hand, their colleagues from the OPKE (Special Police Teams for Crime Prevention and Suppression) team proved to be satisfactorily efficient in the game of hide and seek.

PS2: We also dedicate this action to comrade Christos Spilios, who died recently, but will always be in our struggles.

HONOUR FOREVER TO THE ANARCHIST GUERRILLA KYRIAKOS XIMITIRIS.

SOLIDARITY TO COMRADE MARIANNA AND ALL THE COMRADES IN PRISON FOR THE AMPELOKIPI CASE

AGAINST THE TIMES OF SUBORDINATION – CONTINUOUS PROCESS UNTIL THE COMPLETE OVERTHROW OF THE EXISTING

Conspirators of Immediate Reaction (Συνωμότες/ισσες Άμεσης Αντίδρασης)

Source: athens.indymedia

Via & translated by Act for freedom now!

Athens, Greece: Beneath the concrete, something is burning. Statement regarding the occupation of a building and creation of Rasprava Squat

Posted on 2025/04/19 - 2025/04/20 by darknights

Following the end of the event “Revolutionary memory and perspective of the struggle” in Mesologgiou street, a crowd of comrades descended to Kolettis and Themistokleous streets to defend the liberation of the building.
The following is the self-introductory communique of the occupation:

The silence of the metropolis weighs like a stone on our shoulders. The streets are filled with worn-out stares, bodies crawling out of habit, out of fear, out of submission. The world moves along predetermined paths, without a second thought, tempering its dreams. Everything is programmed to work exactly as they want: work, consumption, obedience. Yet, always, beneath the surface, something is boiling.
History is not written by the obedient. A few choose to bear the burden of disobedience. To crack the concrete of normality. To confront the invisible hand of power that chokes every aspect of our lives. Refusing to submit is not a mere stance. It is a call to question, to overturn, to take back everything that belongs to us.
We are comrades, anarchists who derive from different political and ideological backgrounds, but we have found ourselves in the very same fires of struggle. It is there, where our common struggles and collective experiences united us, that we recognized the vital need for the creation of a space for meeting, political maturation¹, exchange of views and organizational empowerment.
At a time when isolation is imposed and communities of struggle are being dismantled by repression, the formation of such spaces is not only necessary – it is crucial.
The repressive blows of recent years have not come by accident. The authorities are attempting to eliminate any focus of resistance, to crush any form of self-organisation and to extinguish the flame of contestation.
Great achievements have been lost, the movement has been put on the defensive, the recession is now on the horizon. But we know that history is written by those who do not fall back, by those who are not afraid to confront reality.
To remain on the defensive is to accept defeat. And that is not going to happen.
The time is now to turn words into action, to move from defense to attack.
So let’s make it clear that the enemy will not get rid of us so easily.
We must define our own field of struggle, reclaim our space and time.
To liberate territories from domination, to create a vibrant centre of resistance, a radical cell for mobilisation² both in theory and action.
We perceive the occupation as an integral part of the movement and the movement as an organic element of the occupation.
The existence of territories of struggle is not just a practical question, but a deeply political one.
Squats are not just places to hang out, they are not just places of hospitality.
They are strongholds of resistance, laboratories of radical practices, cracks in the normality they try to impose on us.
And this is a non-negotiable reality.
Every neighbourhood, every street, every square is not a neutral ground. It is a vibrant map of oppositions, conflicts and claims. Cities are built on the basis of discipline, policing and the sterilization of public space. Squares are filled with surveillance cameras, walls are painted grey, buildings become inaccessible bastions for those who cannot afford to pay the price of existence in a world where everything has a tag price.
Dominance is implementing a strategic plan of universal control of the metropolises, crushing any source of resistance.
Armed with black propaganda and ideological warfare, it attempts to shape consciousness, while the deliberate degradation of neighbourhoods through the spread of organised crime and the violent expulsion of the local population is paving the way for its complete absorption by capital. Continue reading “Athens, Greece: Beneath the concrete, something is burning. Statement regarding the occupation of a building and creation of Rasprava Squat” →

December 6, 2008: Video of the first clashes on the night of the murder outside the Polytechnic University

Posted on 2024/12/09 by darknights

December 2008: Footage from the clashes of the first night of an uprising that would follow, just hours after the murder of 15-year-old Alexandros Grigoropoulos by police in Exarcheia. [DN: Athens, Greece]

The first part is from the first night outside the Polytechnic on Saturday, December 6th, the second part is from the shop break-ins on Ermou Street, also the first night, and the third footage is from the first confrontational march the next morning towards GADA, on Sunday, December 7th.

Source: Perseus999

“We refuse consensus, their dilemmas, social peace.”

Posted on 2024/07/12 - 2024/07/12 by darknights

Responsibility claim for the burnt ballot box in Exarcheia

June 18, 2012

Responsibility claim for the burnt ballot box in Exarcheia, Athens on the night of the election of June 17th, 2012.

Everything around us seems to unwind in coercive binaries: memorandum/anti-memorandum, drachma/euro, fascism/anti-fascism. Perhaps even among our ranks it is necessary to take a position, to take a stance in this liminal conjuncture. Yet we don’t for a moment forget the only real binary: Revolution or consistency with the existent.

We refuse consensus, their dilemmas, social peace. Security concerns the profits of local and international capital; freedom concerns everyone else. The state and capital, the fascist and the banks are no invisible forces. They have names and addresses. They’d better begin to count down their days of plenty.

We look behind, in the past few years, at tough struggles. How can the barricades and the fires of February 12th fit in ballot boxes? How can the voices shouting “Enough!” fit in these boxes, voices raised by the few, the dignified proletarians at the times of wage fear and subordination? How can the struggles fit in those boxes, the struggles fought city after city, neighbourhood after neighbourhood, with the scum of GD? How can our brothers and sisters fit, those who are missing from our side, yet they are always next to us, even when in the cells of the regime?

At these liminal times, which have no space for reservations we attempt the unthinkable and we make the above ‘fit’. The 1000ml of petrol that we placed in the ballot box of the 18th polling station in Exarcheia at the June 17th elections are our 1000 votes, they are our 1000 challenges in an unpacifiable war.

The revolution first and always

P.S. A raised fist for the comrade Olga Oikonomidou*

Claim for expropriation and arson of polling boxes

07/07/2019

Our ears are ringing with the desperate calls from parties and other political actors to participate in the democratic electoral process. A small group of comrades were moved by the pathetic vote beggars and armed with determination, the will for direct action and our sledgehammers we participated in the democratic fiasco. We broke with the above the delegation regime that prevails as normality and formed our own terms of attack and sabotage in their celebration .

We therefore take responsibility for the invasion of the 33rd Athens polling station a few minutes before the end of the process, where we expropriated a ballot box. On our entry we frantically searched the police guarding the polling station, but as we found out while they were there they chose to play hide and seek (successfully, it is true). At the moment of our departure we left a gift of a (stolen by cops) tear gas canister to the deadbeat party clerks and the willing democratic garbage of the election committees. A few seconds later we consigned the inside of the ballot box to the only fate it deserves: fire.

This action is a warm welcome from our side to Kyriakos Mitsotakis and New Democracy, who have promised to finish us off. We are waiting for you…

SABOTAGE OF THE ELECTORAL PROCESS

FIRE IN THE BALLOTS

Ballot arsonists

DN Note

*Olga Economidou was arrested on 14/03/2011, in Volos, along with another 4 CCF’s members, after a night raid by police’s special forces and Anti-terrorist squads at the house they where living. In December of 2014, she was sentened to 25 years in prison in the Fire Conspiracy Cells case.

She was previously tried for participating in street fights during the Polytehnio memorial demonstration, on 17/11/1998. She was prosecuted for “Volos case” (alleged bank robbery, while being dressed up like cops), for her involvement with explosives and guns, which were found on other people prosecuted for the same case (arrests in Pireus and Kallithea), for the 14 parcel bombs case, for the case concerning 250 attacks by CCF between 2008 and 2011, for the text in solidarity with Anarchist Squat Nadir (second eviction in October 2011) and for instigation concerning “Phoenix” project. She was also under investigation concerning “Ardire” case, which was launched on June 2012 by the Italian prosecuting authorities, which claim to have found and confiscated letters from her, in the houses of Italian comrades prosecuted for the case.

In 2016 she was sentenced to 115 years of prison together with 10 other members of CCF in the trial connected with the escape plan. Now released.

Athens, Greece: Attack on the MAT (riot cops) in Exarcheia square for Mauricio Morales present!

Posted on 2024/05/24 by darknights

Shortly after midnight on Saturday 18/5, we carried out a coordinated attack on the MAT protecting the metro construction site in Exarchia square. We attacked them simultaneously from three different streets, Themistokleous, Solomou and Metaxas. The cops, once again, were running in panic trying to get away from the fires.

This action came amid a time when the sheet metal of the construction site is expanding, where the government is preparing the ground for new more repressive measures, both in the universities and more widely in the neighborhoods, taking advantage as usual of the summer season when the possibilities for organized and mass resistance are reduced. So this is our response to remind them that, as always, they will find us in front of them.

15 years after the death of Mauricio Morales we send a signal of fire and complicity from Greece to Chile, honoring the international cooperation that existed between these two lands not many years ago. Let the slogan “spark in Santiago, fire in Athens” become a reality again.

Mauricio Morales present

Source: athens.indymedia

Via & translated by Act for freedom now!

Greece: Student protests and molotov attacks due to the state announcment for privatisation of universities

Posted on 2024/01/25 - 2024/01/27 by darknights

Recordings from the university marches in Athens & Thessaloniki with the participation of thousands of students against the bill for private universities, on Thursday 18 January 2024.

Athens, Greece: Claim for molotov attack on OPKE

Posted on 2023/11/26 - 2023/11/26 by darknights

On Thursday 16/11 we chose to attack the platoon of the notorious OPKE group (Crime Prevention and Suppression Groups, Ομάδες Πρόληψης και Καταστολής Εγκλήματος) at the junction of Navarino and Charilaou Trikoupis streets. The result of the attack was the burning of the vehicle and the injury of some of them. Our attack is both a small crack in the enforced blockade of the area of the annexes by the uniformed scum of the Democracy, and a small reminder that nothing will go unanswered.

50 years after the Polytechnic uprising, 15 years after December ’08, which erupted after the murder of the anarchist student Alexandros Grigoropoulos, the states and the capitalists have launched an attack of unprecedented intensity on the conquests won through blood and struggle. The intensity of the attack is experienced by the most impoverished sections of society who are subject to daily exploitation. The murders in the workplaces and work sites, at the borders, in prisons and police checkpoints are dubbed ‘industrial accidents’, ‘isolated incidents’, ‘shootings’ and occupy a single column in the margin of a newspaper. But they are clearly state and capitalist killings in an environment where our lives are devalued and expendable. In a neoliberal environment where the bosses, whose sole criteria is to increase their profitability, aim the guns of the cops at the disposable, poor, outcasts and petty criminals. The forces of repression have always been the murderous assault battalions of bourgeois democracy. The uniformed murderers have stained their hands with blood, blood that has not yet dried after the recent cold-blooded murder of the Roma Christos Michalopoulos in Voiotia, the murder of Kostas Manioudakis, the attempted murder of the 16-year-old girl B. in Neo Heraklion and the countless beatings of demonstrators, strikers, etc. The natural perpetrators and instigators of the above incidents were men of the OPKE, a gang of murderers and torturers. To remind that no state murder will go unanswered, that the lives of the Roma count, that the blood flows and calls for revolt, interventions like these are an organic duty of every movement, organization, social process that has reference to the cause of social revolution. They are an organic task for the formation of a revolutionary movement so that the projections of social and class self-defence are not empty and heavy-handed declarations but positions of battle that actively challenge the monopoly of state/capitalist violence.

We send militant greetings to the antifascist comrades who have confronted the state and the fascists in the run-up to November 1, striking blows against the common front of cops and fascists, promoting solidarity and comradeship which remain our most powerful weapons.

Good Freedom to the guerrilla and member of the Revolutionary Struggle Pola Roupa and to comrade Kostas Dimalexis.

Solidarity to comrade Polykarpos Georgiadis (trial 13/12) and to those accused of the state frame-up called “comrades”.

Strength to the comrades D.S. and R.Z. accused of attempted explosion in Thessaloniki.

Freedom for Palestine.

Nothing is over, everything continues.

Michalis Kaltezas* Cell

Source: athens.indymedia

DN Note

*Michalis Kaltezas, the murder took place during demonstrations on the anniversary of the Polytechnic uprising in 1985. The cop Athanasios Melistas shot the 15-year-old student Michalis Kaltezas in the back of the head from a distance of twenty metres as he was running with other demonstrators towards Exarchia Square. Immediately after the death of Kaltezas, anarchists occupied the old Chemistry building on Solonos and the Polytechnic in protest. On the morning of 18 November, the University Asylum Committee, chaired by the rector Michael Stathopoulos, gave permission for the police to enter the Chemistry building. The invasion was carried out with the use of tear gas, for the first time since 1976 and the police arrested 37 people and beat them severly, while a few managed to escape and reach the occupation of the Polytechnic through the sewers. This was the first lifting of the asylum since its official establishment in 1982. The riots in Athens continued in the following days. The cop murderer was sentenced to two years imprisonment, but he appealed and was declared innocent. Revolutionary organization 17 November attacked a police van to revenge the death of Kaltezas; the attack resulted in the death of a police officer.

Athens, Greece: Responsibility claim for the attack on a police patrol at Strefi Hill on 15/6

Posted on 2023/06/27 by darknights

We are at a juncture where, in the space of just a few months, we have counted two mass state capitalist murders, in Tempe and Pylos, which demonstrate in the most deafening way the very essence of capitalism. We are under no illusions and we know very well that in the face of the deadlock and bankruptcy of the state-capitalist system, the only answer that the state and capital have to propose is, on the one hand, to create new hotbeds of imperialist conflict and intervention in the capitalist regions, thus creating new hundreds of dead, both on the battlefields and in the debris left behind by war and the overexploitation of resources, and on the heavily guarded border lines, which have resulted in the Mediterranean becoming a vast graveyard of refugees.

On the other hand, in the capitalist centres of the West, capital and the state are looking for new areas of profitability through further class devaluation, impoverishment and death politics, which in turn create modern metropolitan guarded sweatshops in which we are forced to survive in conditions of misery with meagre wages as a result of the overvaluation of our labour power, with one worker murder after another, with the coverage of our basic material needs becoming more and more difficult, and the deterioration of the structures that cover basic social needs of transportation, health, education, etc. and with a state that is further entrenching itself by militarising its metropolises and increasing military budgets.

So at the same time as the state is generously spreading death, oppression, exploitation and destruction, it is inviting us to participate in the carnival of elections to choose which party will “save” us and which party will provide the best opposition. It invites us to entrust the management of our lives to saviours great and small, and once we have chosen we can proudly return to normality, where people are murdered at the borders, in police stations, on the streets, in the workers’ sweatshops. We can return to the normalcy of “passports” and starvation wages, of snitch journalists and exhausted and unpaid overtime, of evictions and home foreclosures. The normalcy we legitimize by voting consent and submission. In the face of their normalcy there is disobedience, resistance and rebellion. Against the vote of delegation there is collectivity, self-organization, faith in our strengths and in the potential of all the oppressed and exploited. The belief that this world will be changed by us, through collective struggles we will stand on our feet and attack the state, capital and their praetorian guard. Continue reading “Athens, Greece: Responsibility claim for the attack on a police patrol at Strefi Hill on 15/6” →

Athens, Greece: For the attack and the damage to Pharaoh in Solomou, Exarchia by Comrades, Anarchists

Posted on 2023/06/27 by darknights

As the struggle between the classes becomes wilder and the ideologies of development pave the way for the plundering of human and natural resources, turning the seas, the trees, the air we breathe into fields of profit at any cost, the upper classes become stronger and increase their wealth. As long as the lives of those from below are nothing but numbers to be managed and percentages of losses, such as the hundreds of dead displaced off Pylos, the passengers and workers on the trains of Tempi and the murdered workers in the sweatshops of the big bosses, capital is contentedly entrenching itself and preparing for new rounds of accumulation, deepening the terms of the devaluation of our lives.

The proclamation of the centre of Athens and especially of Exarchia, as a new field of profitability to which small and big businessmen are turning, is well known. Tourism and consumption have turned every hole into an opportunity. Numerous apartments are being converted into Airbnb, pushing up the remaining rents even higher, displacing poorer residents. Every public and open space, from the Strefi and Exarchia Square, to the May Day Square and the Museum, has been fenced off and included in plans to redevelop it and turn it into a supervised space for tourists and consumers. The police terrorism, the evacuation of squats and political spaces, the bullying and harassment of passers-by and residents by the ELAS men, the sealing of the Polytechnic, the increasing placement of cameras, are central repressive moves and reveal the political sign of this aggressive epicism.

In other words, for the business of white and black capital to flourish in our regions, the resistance that has taken root over the years must be silenced. The blockades of those from above that have been happening over time in the region, with the intolerable presence of politicians, exploiters and bigwigs of all kinds, must stop. To stop the precepts of solidarity among the oppressed, self-organization and opposition to the skinners of our lives and dreams.

But what they all forget is that these neighborhoods are still ours. That their well-polished storefronts can come crashing down on their heads with a bang, no matter how well they are guarded by their all manner of cops. Our small contribution to this reminder was our recent trip to Pharaoh’s on Solomou. On Friday 9 June, in broad daylight and under the nose of the anchored forces of repression at arm’s length, we interfered with the restaurant, damaging its interior and destroying their cellar of very expensive wines.

This shop, borrowing its concept from various other examples in western metropolises, jumped on the chariot of gentrification, selling alternativeism in an expensive wrapper. Pharaoh’s four entrepreneurs, Maidan columnists, TV chefs, troubadour foodies and others, gave rise to the arrival of socialites of all kinds in the area. Amidst the homeless and pissed-up sidewalks, with their expensive cars often guarded by their inflatable escorts, mob bosses, businessmen, and half the government’s cabinet have dined at this establishment. We should note here, of course, that Mitsotakis’ recent visit to this place was not as carefree as he expected, thanks to some angry residents. The clientele of this shop, therefore, validates by their presence the predestined targeting of the rotten world they represent. The opening of the field of profitability of local and foreign capital around the axis of Patision and the repression of anyone who resists it.

The war they have declared against us is sharpening and so must our struggles. Through dynamic responses and persistence, we can impose significant costs on all these would-be entrepreneurs, raising mounds to the touristization of everything and the conversion of our neighborhoods into commodities.

So that ministers, prime ministers, mayors and greasy mafiosi have no illusions that they will dine undisturbed in our parts.

To put smaller and larger cracks in their well-polished windows.

To move from questioning to conflict.

POVERTY, EXPLOITATION AND EXCLUSION
THAT’S WHAT GENTRIFICATION MEANS

SOLIDARITY WITH REFUGEES AND MIGRANTS

Comrades, Anarchists

Source: athens.indymedia

Athens, Greece: Responsibility claim for attacks on Airbnb, hotels and cameras in Exarcheia

Posted on 2023/04/28 by darknights

In a virgin forest, a wild mountain, a quiet clean sea, a beautiful neighbourhood, the capitalist sees a “fillet”, a new field of investment and profitability. There is nothing in the world we live in, in the world of state power and the capitalist organization of the economy, that does not have a certain exchange value, that is not valued in money. Such is the nature of capital that it is driven to perpetual expansion as a condition of its survival and reproduction. Everything in nature and society is a target and a field for exploitation. In a miniature version of this process, the neighbourhood of Exarchia has recently been subjected to one of the strongest attacks in recent decades by the State and Capital. Like many other neighbourhoods in the centre of Athens, Exarcheia is still an ‘unexploited’ field for various kinds of big investors. A neighbourhood in the centre of the city, in the midst of its facade, that has been “left behind” in terms of infrastructure, big investments and profit supply to the capitalist machine.

But it is also a special neighborhood. It is different from the other – several other – downtown neighbourhoods that remain ‘underdeveloped’ and undeveloped and for which the same future of ‘development’ is foreseen. It is the neighbourhood of movements, of struggles, of politicised youth, of radicalism, of anarchists. The state has every reason to allocate many of its forces and resources to subjugate, refine, clean up, normalize Exarcheia and offer it, under its auspices, as a pawn to investors. The state knows that, traditionally, Exarcheia is the reference point of radical movements, the “headquarters” of the internal enemy. In recent years, and with particular intensity during the New Democracy government, the state has been attempting to fight what it imagines to be the final battle for the neighbourhood.

This is not, of course, a choice detached from the big picture of state policy. At the juncture of the last few years, the state seems to have considered – and, moreover, proclaimed – that it is the historically and socially appropriate moment to end the deep-rooted domestic revolutionary tradition, political radicalism, anarchists, movements, what its right-wing managers call the “ideological hegemony of the left”. In the era of economic crisis, high inflation and the coming recession, war and geopolitical upheavals, the Greek state is being shielded in the face of an unstable future. Continue reading “Athens, Greece: Responsibility claim for attacks on Airbnb, hotels and cameras in Exarcheia” →