Anastasia Balezdrova
A destroyed cafe, broken benches, broken marble slabs, a burned pavilion, broken windows and street lights, municipal trucks, washers and cleaning workers with gas masks. This is Syntagma hours after the unprecedented clashes between groups of young people with covered faces and the police.
The "Visit Syntagma" adventure starts from the subway station. The closer you get to the exit, the more you feel the tangible smell of asphyxiating gases. The inscriptions on the walls testify to the yesterday's violent events. The slogans "Death to the Papandreou’s junta", "Down with the junta" and "Cops, Pigs, Killers" cover the walls of the exhibition hall of the subway, which was a "field" medical centre yesterday, where doctors and rescuers gave first aid to suffocating and injured demonstrators.
The people are sneezing, wiping their noses and covering their faces with handkerchiefs. Those better prepared are equipped with surgical masks, like the youths distributing flyers at the exit. When you get to the square, the first thing you see are the broken white statues in the fountain, collected from different parts of the square and placed there to be assembled later. Municipal trucks and washers are going around the square, while officers with gas masks are sweeping the burnt remains of the yesterday's arson. Another man is pouring water on the waste collected in the truck to eliminate the danger of fire.
The cafe up the square is destroyed. Broken windows, chairs, cups and burned booths fill the space where there were tables and chairs yesterday. The protesting anarchists threw them against the police yesterday. "Will we eat only tear gas?" someone sprayed on one of the outside walls. Today, the pigeons on the square are feasting, eating from the empty trays of sweets and boxes of ice cream. Some employees were at the cafeteria, helping to clean it; others were staying in front of it, trying to swallow the bitter truth that they are unemployed.
There are no wooden seats on the benches, even the iron bars of the ditches are broken, and the marble slabs of the side fountains. Scary are the stairs at the entrance of the luxury hotel King George emptied yesterday, as there has remained the cement base and the adhesive for the marble tiles.
Some of the few members of the leftist groups who remained on the square have made garlands of used packages of asphyxiating and tear gases. Others have made a police officer from a male statue, putting a helmet on the head and a wand in the hand.
The content of chemical gases in the air in front of the Parliament is still very high. It feels as if someone has sprayed the gases minutes earlier. However, although the boulevard traffic is running, the area around the Parliament building is still cut and very closely guarded.
Now the only thing reminding of the hundreds of discontented people are the large posters and billboards with slogans that are sadly waving in the breeze. Most of the people on the square are leaving the subway to go to work, the media that are tracking the results of the outrage and tourists who are either running with their big suitcases, or shooting the latest "tourist" site in the Greek capital.
More photos from Syntagma Square available in the GRR image section below.
RSS
Facebook
Twitter
YouTube
