October 19, 2011
Greece's great economic crisis turned into a massive showdown between the little man on the street and lawmakers in Athens's 300-seat parliament when tens of thousands of protesters marched on parliament in a day marked by fury, defiance and ultimately violence.
A demonstration that will be remembered as one of the biggest in modern times – with around 100,000 Greeks taking to the streets ahead of a crucial vote on stinging austerity – ended in ferocious street fighting on Wednesday after riot police fired teargas into the crowd and youths responded with a volley of rocks and petrol bombs. A heavy security operation by a government that appears increasingly under siege did little to stop protesters pushing their way up to the great marble steps of the parliament building itself.
By nightfall, as the two main squares of Syntagma and Monastiraki went up in flames – black smoke billowing into the sky, the boom of stun grenades rending the air as police chased black-clad protesters past archaeological sites – there was a sense that two years into this "war", the battle lines had been finally drawn.
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