The name is absent

104

While discussing the plight of local migrant groups with a friend who worked at
the Athens office of an international NGO, I was told about a house located in Halandri
where local youth had created a “safe space” for undocumented foreigners, individuals of
“contrary social opinion”, and for those curious about foreign cultures, language, and
society. He gave me general directions and I headed off the next day to find this house,
purportedly the first “safe space^,,-style center in the Athenian suburbs. After a short walk
I found myself in an affluent neighborhood walking along a creek towards the north-east
of the suburb. It seemed doubtful to me that any kind of dissident social movement could
manifest in this area. At the time, I had been living in Halandri for nearly a year and had
visited the suburb regularly many years prior to my fieldwork; but I had never seen this
house, nor had heard anything about it. In fact, I had walked the same street my contact
pointed me to several times and had never noticed anything out of the ordinary. As I
approached the end of my directions I began to look for an old shack, or, in a moment of
J.K. Rowling-inspired imagination, a nondescript door hidden between ordinary
apartments; however, what I found was a large abandoned home on an enormous plot of
land - apparently the only magic hiding it from me before was my own selective
attentiveness.

The property alone must have been worth millions of Euros, but the home was
also quite substantial consisting of at least two floors and an expansive cellar. Looking at
it for the first time I was amazed that this large home and its property had remained
untouched by developers; it later occurred to me that the site was probably protected from
sale by the usual tangle of inheritance claims that complicate the legal standing of old
properties like this. Unfortunately, my efforts to Ieam more about the site’s legal status

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