Monday October 27th 2014: Info-night and benefit for Prosfygika occupied neighbourhood in Athens, Greece, Volkseten Vegazulu, 19:00.
“Prosfygika”, or otherwise refugee homes, is a complex of residential flats built in 1930’s to house refugees resulting from the Asia Minor conflict between Greece and Turkey. The buildings are situated on a central avenue of Athens, surrounded on either side by the police HQ and the supreme court, in a heavily gentrified area . After years of abandonment, Prosfygika has been increasingly reclaiming its original purpose as many refugees, migrants, poor, greek and foreigner working class people have sought to resolve their need for housing by squatting the empty flats.
For some years now, people from the neighbourhood have organized on the basis of collective procedures and communal resources in order to meet the daily and particular needs of the neighbourhood. The ceaseless activity of the community of Occupied Prosfygika includes building maintenance, baking bread, collective cooking, laundry facilities, making soap, a school for migrants and locals and hosting refugees on emergency basis. The evolution of the self organized community has emerged from the initiatives of an assembly with horizontal procedures (which has been active in the neighbourhood since 2011). This assembly participates in the movement of class and social struggle expressing its solidarity in a number of ways.
At this moment over five hundred people coming from every category of the classes of the oppressed live in Prosfygika. Migrants, refugees, families with young children, elderly people, patients, previously homeless men and women, political fighters, drugs addicts attending the rehabilitation programme in the nearby hospital (Elpi), people of different ethnic and religious background. This here constitutes a multinational mosaic of communities coming from the most persecuted and ravaged people of this world; people that have experienced capitalist war first hand, experienced exile and torture, poverty and wretchedness, persecution and hunger.
On March 11th, 2014, 138 occupied residential apartments of Prosfygika were handed over to TAIPED (Hellenic Republic Asset Development Fund, an organization that was set up in recent years with the explicit purpose of selling off public property to private interest) with the purpose of selling them off for financial gain. Since then they are facing imminent eviction so that’s why the Assembly of Occupied Prosfygika have started an international campaign calling for support. The benefit of tonight voku will be sended to them to help in their struggle so join us for a nice dinner and learn more about this squatted neighbourhood resistance.
Volkseten Vegazulu is a people’s kitchen, every monday and thursday, 19:00 PM, vegan food for 4€ or donation. All benefits go for social & political struggles. No reservation.
We’re always looking for cooks. Any help is welcome in the kitchen. Experience not required. Enjoying it is a must. If you want to know which days are still available in the schedule, send an email to joe [at] squat [dot] net and book yourself the night. You can, of course, also participate by rolling up your sleeves and doing the dishes.
