October 11 was a busy day at O Allos Anthropos (“The Other Person”), a community soup kitchen in the Kerameikos neighborhood of Athens, Greece. The organization had posted an open invitation on Instagram for help. So many people showed up that there wasn’t enough for everyone to do.
One group of volunteers, donning face masks and gloves, sorted clothing donations bound for Evia and Karditsa, two regions of Greece hit hard by extreme late-summer floods. Others cooked tortellini over a gas burner on the sidewalk. The food would be packed in aluminum containers and handed out to hungry people in Kerameikos, where trendy cafes abut dilapidated buildings.
The scene was typical for Athens: a quickly mobilized, person-to-person effort responding to an emergency. It’s a responsibility that O Allos Anthropos has honed since it opened in 2011, in response to the widespread increases in food insecurity and homelessness that followed the 2010 Greek debt crisis. As a condition of European Union and International Monetary Fund bailouts, austerity measures were put in place, leaving many of Greece’s residents poor or unemployed, with little in the way of a public safety net.
In that vacuum, Konstantinos Polychronopoulos, the soup kitchen’s founder, aimed to build community and trust by cooking alongside people in need—many of whom were aging retirees. In 2015, the kitchen turned its attention to another urgent case: feeding an influx of homeless asylum seekers in the city center. This year’s coronavirus pandemic and its economic fallout presented the organization with yet another major crisis.
Leap-frogging from one dire situation to another, longtime volunteer Dhimitris Nora says “the only difference is the people you are feeding.”
This trifecta of emergencies has severely debilitated Greece. In the absence of sufficient response by large-scale state and non-state institutions, organizations like O Allos Anthropos have become part of a widespread, informal network of groups and individuals in Athens providing support to vulnerable communities.
For many, this grassroots infrastructure has become a crucial lifeline during the pandemic, even more so now as spikes in coronavirus cases compel the country to grind through a second lockdown that began November 7. For at least three weeks, residents are again restricting their movements, leaning on local groups to get through this new phase in the pandemic with seemingly no end in sight.
