Malcolm Brabant
BBC News
December 25, 2008
Pulsating punk rock was stoking up the black-clad army of students outside the University of Athens, as, yet again, they prepared to march on parliament.
- A d v e r t i s e m e n t
The Stranglers were singing: “Whatever happened to all the heroes? All the Shakespearoes? They watched their Rome burn.”
The setting was appropriate: the Propylea, as the university’s main building is known, resembles a temple from Greece’s own glorious classical era.
All along Panepistimiou, or University Boulevard, security men in upscale jewellers, boutiques and the Attica department store, hastily lowered the electronic shutters.
The guards at the Bank of Greece retreated behind supposedly impregnable bronze doors, and steeled themselves for yet another assault on the symbols of wealth, prosperity and unbridled capitalism.
Since a policeman shot dead 15-year-old Alexis Grigoropoulos on 6 December, daily riots are estimated to have cost the entrepreneurs in the capital more than $1bn.
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