The four days of rioting in Athens, Greece, bring several personal memories to mind.
The first took place on the western coasts of Crete, at an archaeological excavation with which I’d been involved for several years. The local head of the thirty-or-so workers we had employed, a lovely man who has since gone to his reward, was gazing out at the sea during a midday break, smoking a cigarette, quietly staring. When I asked him what he was thinking about, he responded immediately and with timed eloquence: “It a beautiful thing, the sea.” The word he used was *thalassa*, a word that appears already in Homer, and he spoke this word with reverence and awe. It was a religious thing for him, this sea.
That winter, I was back in Athens, living in the communist workers’ quarter called Exarchia, the very place where the current troubles began. There had been a demonstration, and riot police had been called out. The crowds grew and outrage simmered; soon a chant began, a single word, repeated mantra-like for over an hour. The word was *eleutheria*, “freedom”; this word too goes back to Greek antiquity. And when I asked one of the protestors why he was there, he echoed my Cretan friend: “It’s a beautiful thing, freedom.” He spoke this word with reverence and awe. It was a religious thing for him, this freedom.
To be sure, the reasons for the current troubles in Athens are complicated. There is economic anxiety, anxiety over undocumented immigration, insecurity that is at least as political as it is fiscal. There is also the endless play between the conservative and liberal parties in the nation’s capital.
But lying behind all of this is a simple exercise of the purest spirit of spontaneous democratic politics. The people are responding to what it deems an excessive and inappropriate use of force; the people are holding the state accountable for its violence. And they are doing all of this in the name of freedom.
There is something to marvel at in a modern, western country that takes the archaic values of freedom and autonomy with such seriousness and an appropriate sense of religious awe. The police shot a fifteen year old boy in Exarchia and killed him. For four days, the people of Athens and several other important Greek cities have risen up in anger and outrage, burning tires, throwing stones, demanding justice. No one has been killed, and very few have been injured. This is not blind violence or mob rule. It is rather a carefully choreographed and studied reminder, to all of us, that freedom is precious and worthy of our outraged defense.
The open seas and democratic vistas of such expression possess and pure and sometimes terrifying beauty. But then, as Rilke reminds us, “every angel is terrifying.”
