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Nikos Demisiotis
That Tuesday morning I must have had little sleep. I can barely remember even once jumping out of bed so easily when the alarm clock goes off. I imagine my body had gone into “flight mode”. Not exactly “off”, that is, but not even fully operational.
I dressed unimaginably fast and immediately took the path to the power station. I didn’t even sit down to make the usual first cigarette of the day. I left the house and looked in all directions very carefully. With an exploratory look. As if I was sure someone was watching me. I can still remember the faces of those I met. When I made sure everything was okay, I started.
I got on the train and entered. I realized that no one else in that wagon had my own (borderline psychotic) behavior.
Everything was normal. As normal as can be in condition emergency shutdown.
So; It is a fact that the mind plays various games. Some of them so dangerous that they can distract you from reality.
On the way, I verified that I had with me the identity card and the paper that confirmed that as a journalist I can and must move freely through the center of Athens to cover the facts.
Prohibition 40 years later
Free! What a strange word. How much cargo you carry with you and how easily, like a stone that someone bent over and picked up from the road, you can knock down the window in front of you. Along with his idol.
This was the twentieth course of their revolt Polytechnic, which I would cover as a reporter. However, no previous one was like this. I knew from the first moment it crossed my mind that it would be a forbidden course. And the truth is that I thought about it a long time ago. When the cases started to increase again.
The idea was simple: when the “no” (of the state) becomes “yes” (I want) because “I have to” (inform the public. This is my job. I am the owner).
In a conversation, a friend put it as a possible scenario. “What will we do in case course for the Polytechnic “?
At that point I looked at another friend who had just taken a big puff from his cigarette. “It will be the first prohibited course at the Polytechnic, after 1980 when he was assassinated Koumi and Kanellopoulou “, he said and took the smoke away. Like a black and white image, extracted from a book by Stergios Katsaros.
So in that wagon, and in something that seemed like autopsychoanalysis, I was able to find the reason why I had this behavior. It was the “forbidden” that created all this. Even me, who had with me the role that allowed me to move “freely”.
I remembered the photos from that course in November ’80. Koumi’s crippled face. Your wrinkled body Kanellopoulou. The stories and testimonies of the ancients about the endless forest, about its merciless persecution police to those who dared to defy the prohibition and took to the streets.
The locked center and the successive controls
“Will it be the same today?” I wondered as I walked up the escalator to get to the University. The first thing I saw appear were the hats of two policemen. “Welcome to the Forbidden Center” I thought.
When I look back on those first moments, I’m pretty sure it was very cold. I don’t remember if it was really that cold. However, that was the feeling …
As I turn to Patision I fall on the first check. “We started well”.
Not even 100 meters later, second check. The third check at Kaningos was carried out by a security guard. I reacted, he reacted, the necessary clarifications were made for the nerves on both sides and I continued my solitary path towards the Polytechnic. Now things were clear. This would be a very difficult day.
At the corner of Patision and Stournari, I am arrested for the fourth time. Perhaps they were caused by the black clothes he was wearing and the long beard. I can’t explain it any other way.
The last cop is very nice, I can’t say. Army’s officer. Later, and as the night together with the protective masks made the figures more indistinguishable, he checked me two more times. Until the last time even he laughed.
It was already dark. In the center everything had returned to frost in the morning and that is why I took the opportunity to have a conversation with him and ask him if everything that happened was normal and if he considers it necessary. “What does normal mean and how do we define what is necessary”was his rather diplomatic reply. I tried to see his limits and asked him if he ever thought that what breeds violence is violence. “Unfortunately, violence is often necessary and inevitable”.
In this cat and mouse game (I’m still not sure who was who in that conversation) it occurred to me to ask him how inevitable an aura attack was, mate and “DRASI” motorcyclists to people who were obviously not ready for battle, as it was clear that they had not prepared for such a thing. I did not do it. After all, it didn’t make sense.
The nascent moments of a cold and silly day
Before the tear gas filled our eyes with “razors” and the chemicals took our breath away, I had time to see a rather feminine head peeking out from behind some blinds in an office on the first floor of an apartment building in college. I looked at her for a long time. I suppose it was fear that did not allow that woman to raise the blinds to see comfortably, but she preferred to put them aside for a while.
Fear that Mrs. Maria certainly did not have. The woman who went to leave a flower at the door of the Polytechnic and it almost cost her 300 euros.
When I saw her walk alone and with a firm and confident step towards the door, I was almost sure that it would hardly be possible to save her. Other people had passed (individually and with masks) and had left a flower and then others had passed. No one had caught the eye of the police like that. No one was mobilized by anyone to surround him. No one came to his patrol Immediate action with a high ranking officer inside.
The good thing about being a reporter without the “clutter” of television and scary big camera lenses is that your people open more easily. When she left the flower, I approached her and asked her if she could justify her leaving because … “Trouble is coming”. He told me that he has the necessary papers. I saw her looking at the policemen who were getting closer and closer to her. I told him that he has nothing to fear and that we are here too. She surprised me by saying: “I’m not afraid of anyone. I’m here where I needed to be. I couldn’t do anything else.”.
This was the only ascension moment that day. Lies! There was one more.
The moment when the Greek Actors Association from the balcony of the apartment building on Stournari Street opened the microphone it had installed and broke that icy silence that had covered it all. They read excerpts from the “Human Guardians” by the unforgettable Pericles Korovesi and put the songs of the legendary “Our Big Circus” to the percussion where Xylouris and the shocking Jenny karezi they warned the people that “the struggles they have waged will not be saved, the blood will not be shed.”
When my son asked me the next day how I was at the Polytechnic, I wanted to tell him everything so that he would know. Around the same time I thought that with psychology at the nadir since school closed and he can no longer see his friends, such a conversation would be wrong.
“It was good. But it would be even better if you and your sister were there. Instead of having a little patience, to end the coronavirus and the bans and time to all go together again.” I told. He smiled at me, closed his eyes and went to make another bass attempt and managed to log into Webex to take a lesson.
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