- Date of Incident
- 18 Sep 2013
- Location
- Athens, Greece
- Publication Date
- 21 Sep 2018
- Commissioned By
- Lawyers for the Fyssas family
- Additional Funding
- BAK, basis voor actuele kunst
- Collaborators
- BAK, basis voor actuele kunst
- Methodologies
- Synchronisation, Image Complex, Audio Analysis
- Forums
- Athens Court of Appeal
- Exhibitions
- Forensic Justice, For Ever More Images?, Never Again, Critical Archives IV: Documents, NEAR + FUTURES + QUASI + WORLDS, Investigative Commons, The Murder of Pavlos Fyssas at Sónar+D 2022, Antifascism: Now
Shortly after midnight on 18 September 2013, Pavlos Fyssas, a young Greek anti-fascist rapper, was murdered in Athens, in his home neighbourhood of Keratsini. Both the killer and others who participated in the attack were members of the neo-Nazi organisation Golden Dawn.
Golden Dawn have committed acts of violence against migrants and political opponents ever since their formation in the 1980s, yet most of their crimes have gone unpunished as a result of silent support among the ranks of the Greek police, many of whom are aligned to their nationalist cause.
Forensic Architecture was commissioned by the family of Pavlos Fyssas, and their legal representatives, to reconstruct the events of the night from the audio and video material made available to the court.
Following the murder of Fyssas—a Greek citizen—the national government was finally forced to make a series of arrests.
Sixty-nine members of Golden Dawn, including all of their fifteen members of Greece’s parliament, were arrested. Charges in the trial, relating to events as far back as 2008, allege that even while holding seats in the national parliament, Golden Dawn operated as a criminal organisation.
Even as the ongoing trial threatens the existence of Golden Dawn as a political party, the Greek courts remain reluctant to investigate the role of the police in covering up these crimes.
The investigation established that members of Golden Dawn, including some of the group’s most senior officials, acted in a coordinated manner in relation to the murder, and that members of Greece’s elite special forces police, known as DIAS, were present at the scene before, during and after the murder, and failed to intervene.
Watch our full-length video investigation in English
Watch our full-length video investigation in Greek
Updates
Update — 10 September 2018
Our video investigation, and the accompanying text report, was presented to the courtroom in Korydallos, Athens, where the ‘Golden Dawn trial’ took place. The video would be played again in full the following day.