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crowd grew boisterous, Christos found an opportunity, lit the alcohol-soaked wick
sticking out of his bottle and he threw the cocktail toward the police line. He heard the
bottle smash and the crowd cheer, but he didn’t see where the bottle fell as he had already
began to run toward the Polytechnic University148. Christos had moved his protest
against authority from hidden spaces and smuggling routes, literally, to the front of
popular attention: with a smash of glass and a flash of igniting petrol, Christos took a
fleeting public stand against the conditions of his and his brothers’ lives, for his migrant
friends, and for all those who stood with him. During the protest, these unconventional
citizens had entered the civic space of the polis and became political actors for all to see
(see Christodoulidis 2007:195). Afterwards, at the university, Christos met a number of
young people and some self-identifying anarchists who thanked him for taking part in the
action. These individuals referred to the collection of people taking refuge at the
university and who were protesting on the streets as a united front against the state.
Christos described feeling a momentary sense Ofbelonging to a larger group, of being an
outlaw cum citizen, perhaps part of a broader citizenship that was putting into question its
own boundaries (see Rancière 2007:57, 62). Thus, like in 1974, the Polytechnic had once
again become a ground where citizenship was being re-imagined; albeit this time by a
collection of individuals with unconventional claims and experiences Ofbelonging to the
civic totality.
In the days after the December 2008 civil unrest I wished that my consultant from
Kypseli was still alive. I wondered what he would say about the immigrants and illegal
migrants he lived among, the Roma that sold him fruits, the anarchists that spray-painted
his stoop, and the anti-establishment youth that were finding his neighborhood so trendy,
148 A law dating back to the Junta prohibits police from entering and making arrests on university grounds.