Defending Prosfygika: Solidarity with a Self-Organized Community Under Threat in Athens

The members of the SustainAction project express our solidarity with the residents and defenders of the self-organized community of Prosfygika on Alexandras Avenue in Athens. We are deeply concerned by the escalating threats of eviction, displacement, criminalization, and gentrification directed at one of the most significant infrastructures of collective care, solidarity, and autonomous social reproduction in contemporary Europe.

Since February 5, Aristotelis Hancis, a resident and member of the Prosfygika community, has been on a hunger strike to defend the community, its social infrastructures, and the forms of collective life built there over the past sixteen years. On May 1, another member of the community, Suzon Dopanj, joined the hunger strike in solidarity. Their struggle is not only a struggle for housing, but also for the defense of a living experiment in self-organization, direct democracy, mutual aid, and anti-racist coexistence.

Prosfygika consists of eight historical housing blocks built between 1933 and 1935 for refugees from Asia Minor. Located in the center of Athens, between the main police headquarters and the Court of Appeal, the neighborhood has over the last sixteen years become a unique self-organized community of approximately 400 residents, including Greeks, refugees, migrants, children, elderly people, people with disabilities, people with serious illnesses, and people living under conditions of social precarity.

What exists in Prosfygika today is not simply a housing occupation. It is an infrastructure of collective survival and social solidarity. The community has developed 22 autonomous and open social structures serving both residents and the surrounding neighborhoods of Ampelokipoi and Gyzi. These include childcare and educational spaces, health and pharmacy structures, accommodation for cancer patients and their relatives receiving treatment at Agios Savvas hospital, collective kitchens and bakeries, technical maintenance structures, cultural spaces, libraries, social centers, women’s support structures, and solidarity initiatives for unhoused people. In an era marked by interconnected crises, housing crises, austerity, authoritarianism, racialization, extractivism, and the dismantling of public infrastructures, Prosfygika represents a radically different social vision grounded in solidarity, collective care, and self-management.

For those of us working within SustainAction, the struggle around Prosfygika speaks directly to broader questions central to our project: how communities sustain collective infrastructures in times of multiple crises; how solidarities are built across differences; and how social movements create autonomous forms of social reproduction in the face of anti-social restructuring and authoritarian governance.

We therefore we call for:

• an immediate halt to any eviction plans targeting the Prosfygika community;

• the cancellation of agreements aimed at the forced “redevelopment” and gentrification of the neighborhood;

• guarantees that all residents can remain in their homes and community;

• recognition and protection of the social infrastructures collectively built in Prosfygika;

• broader support and solidarity from movements, researchers, unions, collectives, and civil society organizations across Europe and beyond.

As activist researchers working on housing struggles, social movements, and collective responses to multiple crises, we recognize in Prosfygika an important space of social imagination. We stand with the community in its struggle to defend housing, dignity, and collective life.

In solidarity,

Dominika V. Polanska, Södertörn University

Elżbieta Korolczuk, Södertörn University

Michaela Pixová, Södertörn University & Faculty of Arts, Charles University

Luca Sára Bródy, Södertörn University, Sweden & ELTE Centre for Economic and Regional Studies, Hungary

Ana Vilenica, Södertörn University and University of Belgrade, Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory

Ioana Florea, Södertörn University

Anna Ratecka, Södertörn University, AGH University of Kraków