In Greece there has been a revival of what was termed in the 1930s in the United States ‘The Great Depression’. The economic crisis has led to a restructuring of the conditions of both production and consumption, tore apart the social fabric and led to an image of a country suffering form mass depression.

Dimitris Michalakis

Burnout

[ EPF 2013 FINALIST ]

Large demostrations in Athens since 2010, police repression, violence and irrational use of tear gas, 3500 suicides, massive unemployment (26%) and unpaid work – two out of three young people are unemployed – abolition of health structures in the public sector, closure of mentally ill units, hundreds pawnshops mushrooming all over the country, huge increase in drug addicts and prostitution, homeless people and people who found themselves in the streets, continuous strikes are the consequences of the economic crisis in Greece.

This crisis is not just a financial one. It is a systemic crisis with multiple dimensions; political, social and cultural ones. It is in fact a historical breakthrough and all options for the future are open. The country actually lives in war conditions.

In Greece there has been a revival of what was termed in the 1930s in the United States ‘The Great Depression’. The economic crisis has led to a restructuring of the conditions of both production and consumption, tore apart the social fabric and led to an image of a country suffering form mass depression.

Citizens strongly oppose to austerity measures and keep demonstrating in Athens and in large cities. Police repression and extended use of chemicals causes breathing problems and a suffocating atmosphere in the city.

Many demonstrations lead to violent conflicts. They result in damages to buildings of great historical and architectural value. City streets resemble a bombed landscape.

During the days of great demonstrations thousands of police officers fill the streets of Athens and the capital turns into a war zone. At the same time, police officers’ salaries have been deducted tremendously due to the memorandum.

There has been a dramatic rise in the rate of suicides in Greece. Most of them are unemployed workers or people who went bankrupt. There are a few cases that suicide has become an act of highly symbolic political protest; e.g. in April 2012 in Syntagma Square a pensioner named Dimitris Christoulas shot himself. In his suicide note he wrote: ‘I am not killing myself. They are murdering me’.

Each Greek family goes through its own drama during the crisis. Unemployment, wage and pension reductions, tax hikes and price increases have brought despair to households.

Thousands of immigrants are trapped in Greece without documentation and thus with no ability to travel west, while they are exposed to violence by the police and the far right party of Golden Dawn.

Maria lives in a hostel of social rehabilitation. She has down syndrome. The hostel will be forced shut due to insufficient funding by the ministry of health and social solidarity. Maria will end up in a psychiatric hospital again. Her effort to reintegrate wii be lost triggering a fatal relapse.

In Athens, alone, there are 25.000 homeless people. They sleep on benches, paper boxes or in dwellings. Although there thousands of empty houses and flats that could be used for their accommodation, the Municipality of Athens has taken no initiative to support them.

Unemployment is no doubt the biggest social issue in Greece, reaching a frightening 30%. Young people -up to 25 years- record the highest percentage of unemployment in the European zone (65%). Young adults who had previously been independent, gradually return under their parents’ roof. The financial problems have made their dreams impossible.

My father’s generation (mid sixties) is the last generation that has free and public health care in Greece. The national health system has been shrunk to extinction.

The old shutter became a wall, the paper boxes became a sofa, the reeds by the stream became a ceiling, instead of curtains, there are nylon surfaces; this is Nikos’ makeshift house. Nikos went unemployed. He used to be a contract employee in the broader public sector and lived in the northern suburbs of Athens. He now lives on a hill near the beach, 100 meters from the waves.

The only business that thrive during the crisis are the pawnshops. Inspections have shown that most of them do not fulfill the legal requirements and there are suspicions that they are connected to money laundering. Desperate citizens go to such shops fire selling jewels, family memorabilia and even gold teeth.

I have been reading about Weimar Republic in Germany in the 1920s, the financial crash of 1929 in America, the oil crisis of the 70’s. Now, in Greece history seems to repeat itself in variations.

Half of my friends are unemployed, my parents kept warm with a little stove as they couldn’t afford heating oil this year, my father, in a poor health condition, will soon complete 50 years of work, most of them spent in two jobs, my sister emigrated after having been unemployed, an elderly man I met in the center of Athens sold his gold teeth for a few euros, in my neighborhood workers in one of the largest steel mill of the country went on strike for 272 days after the dismissal of 110 colleagues and a 50% pay cut.

I have traveled and seen countries full of misery, poverty and violence, I have been always moved, but I couldn’t really empathize. In Egypt, where I traveled in 2009, youth unemployement was 90%. In Greece youth unemployment has now reached 65%.

It all begins from my surroundings and ends up on me. Burnout has to do with my own crisis too; I do know it is a part of my life deeply experiential that started four years ago, but i still do not know when and how it will end.

The neighborhood of Perama is located on the west side of city. Here, 50 years ago, people lived in wooden huts. The majority of the constructed houses have been outside the town plan. People got house loans, but their repayment is now impossible. After the period of relative prosperity in the 80’s and 90’s, the situation resembles the situation half a century ago.

Pensioners see their pensions reduced and their life savings evaporated day by day. The majority of them are invited to live in absolute poverty, impoverishment and begging, affording no rent, electricity, telephone, water charges, heating oil and medicine.

Prostitution, drugs and voilations is the only way out for a bunch of young Greeks, while their rage towards the previous generations gets worse and worse.

These carts are a common sight in Athens. Greeks and immigrants search for scraps of metal in trash cans in order to sell them to scrap yards and make their living.

Costas is a 55 years old crippled. He has lost his house. At nights he sleeps in his car and during daytime he collects scraps of metal.

Diseases that have been treated and eliminated decades ago in the Western world reappeared in Greece of 2012. In Evros and Scala Laconia cases of malaria are recorded. That’s the result of dumb spending cuts.

Hellenic Halyvourgia, one of the biggest industries of the country, has used the financial crisis to force workers to sign new contracts, to reduce their wages and to fire others. Production came to an halt and the factory didn’t function for 272 days. Although the strikers’ household couldn’t count on a second salary as most of their wives were unemployed too, women supported fully the fight against the owners.

This contract worker in the tunnel of Tempe constructing a new highway near Thessaloniki gets paid 400 euros per month.

27% of families in Greece cannot afford to cover their basic needs. More and more people end up in soup kitchens organized by NGOs and citizens’ initiatives of solidarity.

The municipality of Athens offers 1200 portions food for lunch and 1200 for supper to homeless and people with nonexistent income.

However Greece holds a leading position in the global commercial shipping, redundancies, salaries of 500 per month, work excess hours are just a few of the reasons that lead dockers on strike in the port of Piraeus.

In maritime zone no ships enter the big shipyards for repairs. It is not only the economic crisis that has led to reduced orders or repairs, but also the conscious and coordinated boycott of the Perama Shipyards. Ship owners want to punish workers for their trade union demands and militancy. Unemployed workers spend their time fishing in Thriasion Plain.

Bio

Dimitris Michalakis was born in 1977 in Elefsina, Greece. He studied photography at the Focus School of Photography in Athens. Since 2004 he has been a regular contributor to K Magazine, (Kathimerini Sunday edition), and the E Magazine (Eleytherotypia Sunday edition). His photographs have been published in various Greek and international publications (Spiegel, Die Zeit, Rolling Stones Magazine). He has traveled on journalistic missions to more than 30 countries, mainly in ex Soviet Countries.

Solo Exhibitions:

2013: ‘Burnout’ (in progress), Coalmine Gallery, Zurich, Swiss

2010: ‘NATO Avenue’, Cheapart Gallery, Athens, / Thessaloniki Biennial, Greece

2008: ‘Old School’ Sen Yung, China Gamma Photo Agency China’s Cultural Olympiad

Group Exhibitions:

2012: ‘NATO Avenue’, LUMIX Festival for  Young Photojournalism,Hannover, Germany

2011: ‘Muslim World’, Sismanoglio Megaro, Istanbul, Turkey

2011: ‘NATO Avenue’, Bursa’s Photography Festival, Turkey

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Dimitris Michalakis