Greek Universities and Freedom

As many of you know, I was in Athens for 4 days earlier this week visiting the Clarks and seeing the city which will be my home from September. Over the next few days I’m going to post some observations on Greek studentdom.

A couryard in one of the university buildings. It's six stories high and is covered in political posters.

Since the 1970s, when the army entered a university campus in central Athens to quell a student demonstration and ended up killing students, it has been written into the Greek constitution that the authorities aren’t allowed onto campuses. The consequence of this is that you are free to do whatever you like on campus and no one can stop you.

As a result, you get a strange mixture of things going on in university campuses. Students do their demonstrations, drug users do their drugs and no one stops anyone. Apparently, last year the students blockaded their university for ages in response to a government policy which they didn’t like. Again, the police couldn’t do a thing.

One thing that really struck me as we looked around the university campuses in Athens was the vast amount of political graffiti and posters around the place. Around the main campus in town, there were vast numbers of students milling around their stalls campaigning about this and that.

Eλευθερία ή Θάνατος (freedom or death) is a motto from the Greek war of independence. Judging from the all the political posters and the amount of anti American graffiti, the Greek desire for freedom evidently continues – this time it’s not freedom from the Ottomon Empire but from the perceived cultural imperialism of the US.

Freedom is a good thing, but these Greek students need to hear that the freedom that is worth dieing for is the freedom from sin, the freedom from the justice that we all face from God and the freedom to be in a correct relationship with God. And you don’t need to die for that as someone else has already done it for you.

One of the things that particularly excites me about working in Athens from September is that we’re free to get onto university campuses and explain this to students!