The name is absent

61

chronograph rested on his wrist echoing the sense of steadfastness, strength and precision
this man seemed to embody.

Nikos’s father was a butcher and his mother was a violin teacher. He grew up in
Attica with his two older brothers in a home that had been in the family for two
generations. His father’s recent decision to sell the property to a developer in exchange
for two apartment units and some cash came as a disappointment to Nikos, but not a
surprise. He explained that the destruction of old homes, that is, “the erasure of family
histories recorded in stone and soil, to make way for apartment blocks serving national
and corporate needs”, was common: “just another example of the destruction of our city
and the degradation of its citizens”. Nikos’s parents don’t know what he does for a living;
“they think I teach at the university” he says chuckling, eyes locked on me.

In his youth Nikos was very interested in politics, and traveled to England in his
early twenties to study government and international relations. During this time away
from home he observed Greece and began to grow increasingly restless. Nikos did not
consider himself an anarchist yet, although he was already enamored by the thought of
the freedom-fighter, the dissident in disguise, which he felt was the only answer the
only Greek answer - to what he perceived to be the growing ideological and economic
chokehold the state and international corporations were having on the citizens of his
homeland. The idea that political change can only be accomplished in Greece through
violent protest is not uncommon, especially among the middle-age population that
witnessed the Polytechnic uprisings. His views were hardly radical or militant or even
iconoclastic for the late 1970s, a time still touched by the student movements of nearly a
decade earlier. A clearer indication of Nikos’s bend towards radicalism were the heroes

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