Through this statement, the Reactionary Politics Research Network sends its unequivocal support and solidarity to Prosfygika and its inhabitants. The preservation of the autonomy of Prosfygika, and places like it, is part of the struggle against reactionary politics. Prosfygika is more than a housing complex or political symbol. It is a living infrastructure of solidarity, collective care, and resistance built against displacement, abandonment, and repression. On Alexandras Avenue in Athens, nestled between a police station, courthouse, football stadium, a busy road and an oncology hospital, sits a small neighbourhood consisting of eight apartment blocks. Its buildings stand out against the surroundings: its walls are older, more weathered, have a slightly warmer yellow hue, and mostly notably are covered in brightly coloured tags and large banners in the verbose style of the Greek autonomous scene.
This is Prosfygika, the largest squatted community in Greece, one of the largest in Europe. Its buildings were constructed between 1933 and 1935 to house refugees displaced from Asia Minor, in an architectural style which emphasises open shared spaces facilitating communal life. Almost a century later, both the complex’s communal way of living, and its intertwinement with the struggle of mobile populations, persist. 400-500 permanent residents, including refugees of war, political exiles, people on the move, families, children, political activists, anarchists and communists, are gathered here. They represent more than 27 national origins, languages, religions, and cultural backgrounds, living together in a diverse but unified self-organised, autonomous community.
The community’s challenges over the decades – repeated eviction attempts and state violence, struggles against drug-trafficking networks, the encroachment of gentrification – led the community of Prosfygika to develop a political vision based on the recognition that to survive on their own terms, they would need to build autonomy. Over the past fifteen years, the Community of Squatted Prosfygika has consolidated a network of autonomous political structures facilitating its capacity to collectively meet its own needs.
22 self-organised structures have emerged and evolved, shaped by both needs and capacities. These include a bakery; a children’s structure supporting the needs and education of the community’s youth; a women’s structure (formed to address the needs of women and femininities within the community, later expanding into the development of broader anti-patriarchal work and tools); a legal support working group; a structure hosting families of patients at the adjacent oncology hospital; community internet provision; and a social centre, among others.
In the summer of 2025, the Region of Attica, in partnership with private investors (and supported by 15 million euros of public funding), confirmed its intention to evict the Community of Squatted Prosfygika. The plan makes no provision for the current residents and is framed as a redevelopment project promising social housing and support for the families of the neighbouring oncology hospital (both of which already exist in self-organised forms within Prosfygika).
The ‘redevelopment’ of Prosfygika means the forcible dismantling of a self-organised community, the displacement of over 400 people from their homes, and a further step in the gentrification of Athens.
Gentrification has become more aggressive because it operates through several pressures at once. In Athens, housing is increasingly treated as an investment asset, while the absence of a strong public or social housing sector leaves renters exposed to the private market. Platforms such as Airbnb have removed homes from the long-term rental stock, pushed up rents and accelerated the touristification of neighbourhoods. This has accelerated process of displacement central to gentrification, where residents are priced out of areas that are then repackaged for visitors, investors and wealthier newcomers. The Greek case is so severe because this process sits on top of a long period of extreme wage compression.
The community is now taking all measures to resist this eviction. Two members of the community, Aristotelis Chantzis and Suzon Doppagne have undertaken a hunger strike to the death, with three key demands:
- The immediate cancellation of the contract by the Region of Attica.
- All Residents of Prosfygika to remain in their homes, in the place and area where they lie and have established, social, cultural, and organic ties.
- Concrete guarantees to be given for the restoration of Prosfygika to the non-profit legal entity ‘Residents and Friends of Prosfygika Alexandras Av.’, with its own self-financed funds.
There are many reasons to oppose the eviction of Prosfygika. The violent displacement of 400 people who are attached to their homes, their community and their way of life, for one, is obvious. The violent destruction of a self-organised community built on autonomous anti-statist principles, which has existed for decades by and for people on the move, might be a harder one for centrists to swallow, but it’s also a good one.
As critical scholars who have made it our mission to analyse and oppose reactionary politics, there are some perhaps even more critical reasons why we should be preoccupied with the eviction of Prosfygika. Many of us have found a community in this network precisely because of an understanding that authoritarianism, racism, and fascism do not emerge as discrete or isolated political objects, operating outside or apart from the mainstream, but are produced and sustained through entanglement with the racist, individualistic and repressive logics of the liberal mainstream.
Greece is currently undergoing an advanced stage of far-right mainstreaming. Since the crisis years, and especially since 2012, strands of the far right have moved from the margins into the political centre, with figures shaped by far-right political trajectories entering New Democracy and, in some cases, holding ministerial office. This has blurred the boundary between the conservative government and reactionary politics. At the same time, Greece has seen the steady presence of multiple far-right parties, including Greek Solution, Niki, the Spartans and Voice of Reason, which have helped keep authoritarian themes visible in public debate. This has been reinforced by the weakness and fragmentation of the institutional left. From a parliamentary perspective, progressive politics appears disorganised and unable to set the terms of debate.
The Greek state has repeatedly sought to destroy autonomous spaces like Prosfygika, not only because gentrification and the commodification of public space serve an obvious profit motive for the state and private investors, but also because they expose the limits of both the market and the state as organisers of social life. The community of Prosfygika not only critiques these ways of organising the world, but puts into practice an entirely different way of living, emphasising collectively-devised solutions, offering a bottom-up antithesis to both reactionary politics and many of the logics that make them possible.
As academics working within institutions deeply entangled with neoliberal and extractive logics, our capacity to resist the rise of reactionary politics depends not onlyon our capacity for critical analysis, or our capacity to point out the hypocrisies and incongruencies of worlds we study. Rather, our usefulness as scholars depends much more on how concretely we can stand in solidarity with and participate in bottom-up resistance to that which we critique, both through and beyond our work as scholars. Resistance to reactionary politics is bolstered by the defence and expansion of durable structures of collective care and mutual obligation which enable people to survive outside the atomising logics of racial capitalism and neoliberalism. Prosfygika recognised this, and, by living the alternative, made it known to the world.
As the Reactionary Politics Research Network, we send our unequivocal support and solidarity to Prosfygika and its inhabitants. The preservation of the autonomy of Prosfygika, and places like it, is part of the struggle against reactionary politics. Prosfygika is more than a housing complex or political symbol. It is a living infrastructure of solidarity, collective care, and resistance built against displacement, abandonment, and repression.
The Internationalist Committee of Prosfygika has made a statement calling for researchers and academics specifically to support the community, and listing a number of ways to do so. You can find this statement here:
https://saveprosfygika.gr/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Call-for-Researchers-and-Academics.pdf