The name is absent

28

the first floor, but which had fallen through. Jigo and his friends slept upstairs at night,
three flights above the bustling street in a home that would have once belonged to the rich,
famous, and powerful of the city but which was at the time certainly mired in various
inheritance claims and by sale, building and renovation restrictions. In the home they
found cooking utensils and other useful detritus from past lodgers. As time went by they
added to this collection a few blankets to sleep on, some clothes, and a discarded
woodstove. Eventually they made friends with some Nigerians involved in the selling of
cheap Chinese imports and they moved away. At the time of the writing of this chapter
the home was occupied by a different group consisting of three Nigerians (including one
woman), one man from Senegal and a few others (including one Afghani man). Out of
necessity, the group shared the home although they did not travel together and were not
particularly friendly. The Nigerians lived upstairs and the others lived on the first floor²⁸.

When I asked Jigo where he was staying at the time of my fieldwork the answer
came in reference to subsistence strategy like “with my work partners, here and there” or
“in a spot we found away from the police, but close to our supplier”. He explained that
they paid €410/month, that their landlord was a Chinese man, and that their bills were
difficult to afford so they resorted to stealing much of their water from the outside taps²⁹
of nearby buildings. When pressed he identified a specific area of the city and the street

²⁸ Although it may be tempting to draw parallels between undocumented migrant strategies for finding and
appropriating urban spaces in Athens and those of the homeless of other major urban centers, especially in
North America (Desjarlais 1997; Glasser 1994; Wagner 1993), I would argue that the similarities are
limited. The history, global flows and local socio-politics that inform the Greek context are unique,
undocumented migrants in Greece view and treat their homes (of all description) as temporary utilitarian
“stations”, and that the socio-cultural networks these places host are markedly dissimilar. A more
productive examination might compare the Athenian phenomenon to studies attentive to the subjective
experience and patterning of urban spaces (see for example Le Marcis 2004).

²⁹ These taps are found mostly in older buildings. Their purpose was for watering gardens and washing
stoops and sidewalks. It is difficult to imagine these activities occurring in today’s densely populated urban
core, and especially in the areas where immigrants live such as Kypseli where greenery is nearly
nonexistent and cars are parked on sidewalks to allow passage on the roads.

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