Our dreams are not up for auction – our turn has not yet been played.
In the 24 years of life of Evangelismos Squat, on its liberated ground, the flame is resistance and the dangerous hope for a different world is being relayed from generation to generation. Always against authority, in the first line of the clashes of our class and of struggles against war, against police brutality, the pillaging of nature, patriarchy and fascism, the Great House is – and will be – a castle of just counter-violence and a social barricade of the city of Heraklion.
The state, despite the three reoccupations following three evictions – a number humiliating for it – has started preparing for revenge. The latest and probably most crucial attack of the state against Evangelismos Squat is the allocation of a sum of six million (!) euros for the “utilization” of the building, with a deadline for the submission of applications that is set on the 30th November 2026. To be clear: neither the state wants to renovate the building, nor does the university intent on utilizing it. The six million sum, as the close to a million sum of the study – which is inapplicable and lacking as the building is still occupied – covers the cost of the political repression of the anarchist movement, and nothing more. In this way, the state apparatus is trying to kill two birds with one stone: it attacks its internal enemies with one hand and with the other it feeds its friends and cooperators with state money. But the deans and ministers have not accounted for the squatters.
Evangelismos is for as an existential requirement. Evangelismos Squat exists because it covers the needs of a society that are being drowned in the modern dystopia. It covers the need for there to exist an anti-commercial social space, it satisfies the desire for counter-institutional struggles beyond the limits of legality and normality, it understands and encourages social rage against authority. Hundreds of events, actions and solidarity structures have crossed its threshold over the years, along with local initiatives and thousands of assemblies. The people that have connected deeply with the house are too many to count and tens of them have found shelter or are still housed in it – and there will be more, especially now, in the middle of the housing crisis. It replies with self-organization, horizontal processes and collective struggle to the isolation and the replacement of life with consumption in this concrete Babylon. As the city center becomes more and more degenerate and begins looking like a tourist amusement park, Evangelismos Squat becomes one of the last images of life outside the glass display.
Evangelismos, for all its years of existence, has been a multifaceted and diverse operational structure of the movement. Currently, in Evangelismos, the following are housed: the Assembly in solidarity with political prisoners, incarcerated fighters and imprisoned comrades, Kitapi – book/achival collective, the Initative for Historical Recording and Revolutionary Memory, the music team Disarmonia, the agricultural collective BeCollective, the give-away bazaar of the Squat, the self-organized café that takes place on Fridays and the editorial team of Heraklion of the street newspaper Apatris; Apatris itself was born in this building, as was the self-organized athletic club of Tiganitis that is now also hosted in it. It is in the hands of the struggling society to make the Squat even more functional and creative – from our side we have to say there are proposals to make collective kitchens a regular occurrence, to house a modern dance workshop and to build a communal bakery and vegetable garden in the backyard, but we also have ideas for the creation of a theater group, a bath for the homeless, self-organized tutoring sessions and a communal pharmacy/doctor’s office.
Desire plants our feet to the ground, need becomes the glue that binds together our community, our conscience is what makes all of us squatters. And if they manage to take over our castle, and if we fall, we will fall on their heads.
We call the struggling community to support the Squat – now and in its upcoming trials – in whichever way each individual believes suits them best. We call our comrades from end to end to walk with us, to defend the grounds of the anarchist movement, to house our needs, to make threat into an opportunity. We call squatters and comrades in solidarity from Crete, Greece, Europe and the entire world to come to Heraklion in the months of August-November, to support the Squat and its guarding, to collectively organize our defenses.
SOLIDARITY WITH SQUATS – VICTORY TO PROSFYGIKA FREEDOM TO THE COMRADES OF THE REPRESSION OPERATIONS OF JULY 10 IN ATHENS AND THESSALONIKI
SOLIDARITY WITH THE IMPRISONED ANARCHISTS OF THE WORLD WE ARE RIGHT WE WILL WIN
Open assembly of Evangelismos Squat, every Monday at 19:00
Evangelismos Squat
June 2026