Pedion tou Areos

A suffocating situation is created in Greece with more than 25,000 refugees and immigrants trapped in the country, while FYROM has essentially sealed its border.

A handful of Athens’ main squares are now, unofficially, makeshift camp sites for Middle East refugees and third world nationals – primarily Afghans – who landed on Greece’s isles before being ferried to the mainland.

The relocation of 200 hundred immigrants and refugees (a drop in the ocean compared to the large flows coming into Greece) from Pedio tou Areos to the newly set up lodgings at the Elaionas facility, situated western of Attica was completed Sunday. According to sources nearly 250 illegal immigrants ‘fled’ just before the transport operation to Votanikos started.

“We didn’t come to Greece to receive money or to create a problem; we want to leave and seek a better future in another country,” is the way the head of one family, who idenified themselves as refugees from Syria, told Proto Thema on Thursday.

Around 500 refugees of Afghan, Iraqi and Syrian origins sheltering in an Athens park say they have no wish to stay in Greece and are hoping to move on to greener EU pastures as soon as they acquire documents.

The drama of the roughly 124,000 refugees that have struggled through the hardships of the journey to reach Greece does not end when they arrive on the country's shores.

Greek authorities are whizzing through work at the Elaionas facility where they hope to relocate refugees from the Pedion tou Areos Park, Athens, by Tuesday. Refugees are expected to be moved to the new region in western Attica by Tuesday. Refugees will be housed in the same containers that also housed the Athens’ earthquake victims in 1999.

The cycling event of the year will take place on Sunday, May 10, at noon, at Pedion tou Areos and thirty cities around Greece. “Let us put bikes in all schools and bike lanes in each district.

Greece’s celebrity Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis is riding on the crest of unbridled support following an attack against him and his wife during dinner on Wednesday at notorious Exarheia – a hubbub for anarchist thoughts and apparently no place for an “erratic Marxist”.

Greece’s main private sector union, GSEE, said on Thursday that its offices were ransacked and many items stolen during a sit-in protest by anarchists in support of Nikos Romanos, who ended his hunger strike on Wednesday.

GSEE said that during the six-day protest a number of offices were broken into, office equipment damaged and hard disks stolen.

In a surprise decision, authorities have banned access to the planted areas of Pedion tou Areos, one of the country’s largest public parks, and other green spaces in Athens.