into possible lives and futures, into larger sociopolitical transformations, which may have already begun to take shape through the seeds of a nascent critical consciousness (Gramsci 1992). These points of movement and opening may never materialize into “history,” or they may already be remaking the world in ways that are not yet visible. Either way, they matter deeply in the lives that Athenians have woven and continue to weave out of broken synapses of the polis.
Finally, this book is critical in that it is focused on analyzing and even exposing aspects of governance, rights discourse, and humanitarian practice that might otherwise remain uninterrogated. But it is not critique. Throughout, I speak to the powerful, but nondeterminative, force of structural violence in placing both asylum seekers and decision makers in profoundly difficult situations. This is not to disregard individual and collective agency; on the contrary, I will later suggest that agency can be found even in moments of hard silence and apparent immovability. But I do not spend a lot of time trying to highlight what my interlocutors have done wrong or could do better. The NGO workers who are such important figures throughout this book are well aware of most critiques that could be made of their own humanitarian practice—and indeed, could launch a few devastating critiques of their own. In my experience, aid workers and human rights professionals in Greece are deeply, even painfully, aware of everything wrong with the asylum process, asylum advocacy and aid work, and rights frameworks more broadly. What I seek to do here, then, is consider how these workers, and the asylum seekers whom they encounter, deal with a broken system without being swallowed whole; why they do it; and what their engagements might say regarding the possibilities and limits of asylum advocacy, aid, and rights-based protection.
Transliterating Greek is a complex matter, with a complex political history, particularly for an Anglophone like me. My goal in transliteration is to render Greek phrases legible to those who do not speak Greek. Rather than making use of the Modern Greek Studies Association transliteration guidelines, which are certainly useful but can be somewhat opaque for non-Greek speakers, I have chosen a style that is focused on phonetic consistence, so as to preserve the musicality of the speech. The downside to this approach is that it does not adequately convey the spelling of Greek words, which also has a complex history (some of which I discuss in Chapter 6), not to be dismissed. Thus, I have also often included the Greek characters, not simply for their elegance, but so as to engage both English and Greek-speaking audiences. Where I diverge from these transliteration norms is in regards to place names. For those places that have a recognizable rendering in the Latin alphabet, I have spelled them the way that is most legible for wider audiences (for example, Lesbos instead of Lesvos; Syntagma, instead of Sintagma).
A Greek friend of mine, on reading through a draft of the manuscript, commented that I should have done more to expose “the real bad guys.” He was referencing the deep patterns of violence and colonial speculation in the Balkans and Asian Minor, including not just Ottoman rule but its aftermath: the ongoing involvement of Northern European and U.S. powers in shaping the futures of the region. Others may object that I do not give significant attention to those in the Greek government, and others in the driver’s seats of the Euro-global “troika” (the European Commission, International Monetary Fund, and European Central Bank) that have contributed greatly to Greece’s marginalization and the exclusion of foreigners within Greece and Europe. This is not a book about them. What you will find here are all sorts of people, who defy easy classification as insider or outsider, “good” or “bad,” but who are seeking to live tolerable, even ethically engaged, lives in ways that are often undone through forces outside their control; in a city that traverses the mythic and the quotidian, the underworld and the world of the living, the laws of blood, the sovereign, and the gods. This is a book about citizens of Athens.
Introduction. The Rock of Judgment
Stavros led me on a leisurely and circuitous route up the Acropolis, the winter lights of Athens below us, and the monuments of the ancient city in sharp relief against the night sky. Eventually we arrived at an outcropping of stones on the northwest side of the Acropolis, which lay in darkness, except for the cigarettes of those who sat atop the rocks chatting quietly. We climbed up, my feet finding slippery grooves in the stone polished smooth from wear as I forsook the ladder that had been placed there for visitors, and we sat looking out at the Athenian night. The clusters of pine trees below us, with their green scent of darkness, opened outward into an unruly city that tumbled over and over upon itself: streets, apartment buildings, the whir of traffic, and lights. This rock, Stavros explained, was Areios Paghos: the high court of the ancient city. The supreme court of civil law in contemporary Greece also bears its name. Here—according to myth—Ares god of war was tried for murdering the son of Poseidon, hence its epithet (rock of Ares). And in Aeschylos’s Eumenides, this is where Athena set up the very first court, with a human jury, to weigh the guilt of Orestes, avenger of his father and murderer of his mother.
To do fieldwork in Athens is always to encounter the mythic city, as it is perpetually reanimated and remade in both topographies and conversations. Stavros himself is a lawyer, who at that time worked at an NGO for asylum seekers in Athens, where we met and shared important conversations. He explained that he often came to this ancient rock of judgment to think: to work through dilemmas of life, love, and law. Despite my occasional vantage point from atop this rock, where I too would sometimes come to think, I generally looked up at the Acropolis, which is visible even from dark and cramped corners of the city center. An oasis of air, stone, and green, the Acropolis rises above the fray like a great rocky head, sitting in watch and perhaps also in judgment over the city. For many Athenians (students of their own mythic histories, retold through popular culture, across generations, and in school), and certainly for many foreigners like myself, the great rock ruptures the topography of the contemporary polis, calling up the ghosts of what was or is imagined to have been: the mythic past then collides with the quotidian, the city of particular routines and practices (see Hamilakis 2007; Yalouri 2001).
From the narrow city center streets, or from my fifth-floor balcony where I could view just a sliver of the Parthenon if I positioned myself just right, during my fieldwork in Athens I looked to the Acropolis as a symbol of judgment but also of refuge. As an undergraduate student of classical religion, I was captivated when an older, particularly brainy friend explained to me that beneath the Acropolis, the center of the polis, reside the Erinyes or Furies. In the very last scene of Aeschylos’s Eumenides, which defuses the dilemmas that have ensnared characters throughout the tragic cycle of the Oresteia, Orestes is acquitted of the charges against him, thanks to Athena, who casts the deciding vote in an otherwise “hung” jury. Yet the Furies, who have chased him all the way from Argos to Athens, threaten to torment the city in retribution: they are ancient goddesses of night, they claim, and they demand recognition. And so Athena issues another judgment, a sovereign act before the audience of the court, but really more of an afterthought, outside the formal space of the law. She offers the Furies refuge beneath the Acropolis, so they might “look over the city as terror watches over the mind.” Thus granted recognition and refuge, the persecuting Furies are transformed, becoming the Eumenides, “the kindly ones,” to be honored for eternity by the citizens of Athens. And as they vanish in a procession of lights into the dark spaces beneath the great rock, the city also is transformed.1
This image of judgment, refuge, and their potential for transformation serves as a mythic backdrop for this book, which explores Greece’s emergence as a country of refuge for persons seeking political asylum. I consider the asylum system in Greece much in the vein of Susan Coutin’s (2000) “ethnography of a legal process,” through which she tracks the asylum claims of Salvadorans in the United States from their inception to their abandonment. Yet, even more, this book is about that which spills over from the formal space of asylum law: the encounters, social interactions, forms of knowledge, and ethical engagements that have their genesis in formal law but are not reducible to it. I argue that judgment and refuge, while eminently necessary, are also impossible within the formal confines of the asylum procedure. Rather, those elements that exceed or even undermine the asylum process have powerful and even transformative effects in claims for protection and the lived experiences of those who make, mediate, and adjudicate such claims. These asides, afterthoughts,