Until victory – hunger strike for 8 blocks

The right arm stretched out and the fingers raised in the victory sign.

This is how Aristos lies on the evening of the 24th.

June on his stretcher.

To his right, the colorful calendar of the Prosfygika community, next to the Kurdish floral scarf that rests on his neck, lightens the whiteness of the hospital.

The combative but, to be honest, somewhat depressing image of the comrade receiving oxygen through a mask and hanging on to all sorts of infusions is burned into my head.

Over 400 people currently live in the self-governing eight blocks known as Prosfygika.

In the more than 16 years of its existence, the community has become a place where people from different countries come, sometimes for a few days, sometimes for a few months.

Some have nothing but a thirst for adventure in Greek conditions, others return visibly influenced, or even stay there because they have never been confronted with such a tangible perspective of community life and self-organization.

Prosfygika is much more than a place for living together, sitting for hours at assemblies and renovating - the project sees itself as an important impulse, as a motor of a political movement that has also become increasingly defensive in Greece in recent years.

If you walk along Alexandras towards the city center, after a while you will come across the shabby stadium of Panathinaikos Athens on your left, complete with lots of graffiti: green clovers, skulls and anti-Nazi lettering are emblazoned on the walls.

Just across the street, black banners greet Prosfygika from the first of Prosfygika's eight blocks.

Those few square kilometers cut a spatially small but, considering their importance, even more significant path into the Greek capital, where increasing misery meets growing wealth and homelessness meets turbo-gentrification.

Even if at first glance Prosfygika is an anarchist project, the said resistance does not end at ideological boundaries: a wide variety of organizations are officially represented in the neighborhood, from revolutionary Turkish organizations to the Kurdish freedom movement.

Some of them can't smell each other in Turkey/Northern Kurdistan, but they are brought together in Athens by the external conditions and live next door to each other here.

The same applies to the majority of the over 400 residents who have found a new political and social home in the community.

This is also how it happens that at the demonstrations that have been going through the streets of Athens for the last few months in defense of the threatened project, hammer and sickle flags cross with black flags with birds hooded in gas masks printed on them, instead of attacking each other when only the words “Bronstadt” or “Spanish Civil War” are mentioned.

We Will Win – We Won!

Over 140 days ago, Aristotelis Chantzis went on an indefinite hunger strike with the slogan “We will win or we will win”, which is a reference to the Kurdish saying “An serkeftin – an serkeftin”.

The message conveyed by Aristos and Suzon, the second person to go on indefinite hunger strike 56 days ago, is as clear as the Greek sky at this time of year: either we will be victorious or we will be victorious.

Failure is therefore not an option and the announced will to succeed is not based on the fate of the individual, but is thought over generations and materializes in the real movement.

Once you've made it across the busy Alexandras, knock on the front left window and Aristos comes out on the balcony for a cigarette, it's not for nothing that he'll tell you about the work of the Kurdish revolutionaries in the prison in Amed or the resistance of the Hawks of the Mountains, the partisans in the fight against the occupation by Nazi Germany and their Greek collaborators.

The story comes to life on his lips, sunken by hunger, and comes into the present when his brown eyes begin to shine.

Last Monday, the 138th

On the day of the hunger strike, Aristos, who weighs only 35 kilos, had to be taken to hospital due to a deterioration in his condition and the development of an acute illness of the central nervous system.

A day later, thousands of supporters of the project and the hunger strikers flocked to Syntagma Square and the hospital.

Two days after Aristos was admitted to the hospital, a short video sequence in which Suzon hugged Aristos, who was sitting in a wheelchair, and rubbed his head went viral in the evening - We won!

That same evening, after months of inaction, sitting out and imposing bans on media reporting, the Athenian city council met and voted that the demands of the Prosfygika resistance be met and that the plans for gentrification be stopped for the time being.

Meanwhile, Aristos' condition remains critical and he requires oxygen via a mask.

No matter what happens, the fight will not be over.

The fact that he was accepted and was victorious at this stage is thanks to the hunger strikers who, at the risk of their lives, were able to stop the plans to destroy the community and thus send a signal that we are certainly capable of winning victories.

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