I Was At #Occupy Syntagma Square All Summer by Elias Theodoropoulos

Text and Photographs By Elias Theodoropoulos, DEMOTIX

(click on images to enlarge)

I was at #Occupy Syntagma Square All Summer

My home is near

I was there every day

It was a fantastic experience

For three months the square was ours

We demanded direct democracy

Our General Assembly had thousands of participants

We were very organized

We had on site

Health care

Social kitchen

Cultural team

With music concerts

And street plays

Hundreds of people lived in the Square

Mostly the homeless and poor

But also some people that guarded the facilities

We had computers, cameras, microphones

Livestreaming

And the assembly was also live

We were very organized

We were thinking that we were living in historic moments

But then, the police hit us a lot

We were peaceful

But they had the advantage

Within 2 days they ruined all the facilities

The police and the municipality of Athens united

Because they said that we were bad for the tourists

The municipality wanted to clean the square for the tourists

The summer after we protested peacefully

Nothing changed

Except that we earned solidarity, organization and assemblies

We took it back to the neighborhoods

Now, many people have assemblies in their neighborhood

In the summer we were hundreds of thousands in the square

It was extraordinaire

Magic

You could feel the pulse

The optimism

The hope

It was one of the best things in my life

It was a parallel system

A community

With equality

And solidarity

And people did the same in other countries

Nowadays, people have no other solution than to do what we did in the occupy movement

We got organized

And took our lives back

Don’t believe in any savior

Only you and your co occupiers

We decide all together

And we take actions

It is marvelous

We were sometimes over 3000 people talking

For hours

It was an eclesia tou Dimou

That’s what they called it in ancient Athens

All the citizens in a general assembly

Eclesia tou Dimou

Demou

Democracy

Demos

Eclesia

Is the assembly