I Spent the Night in Greece's Favorite Drug Hangout

Photos by Alexia Tsagari

Hamid is waiting for me at a bus stop right next to Alexandras Avenue in Athens, Greece. He’s almost 35, extremely skinny, and he has scars all over his face. This evening, he's chosen to wear a reflective white jacket, torn jeans, and a shiny pair of red sneakers—not a very wise choice for someone trying to sell small amounts of sisa, the dirt-cheap alternative to crystal meth that's become popular in Greece's capital over the past couple of years.

But at least his clients can spot him easily in this outfit. A quick nod is enough to tell them that it's safe to approach him and hand over their money.

Hamid was born in Tehran. He started working some part-time jobs at the age of 14, and when he turned 20, he joined an anti-regime group to fight against Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, whom he calls "the world's most vicious man." At some point he was arrested and held captive, but he doesn’t like talking about that, and he changes the subject as we approach the park entrance.

Pedion tou Areos Park—one of the largest public parks in Athens—is only supposed to be open to the public until 11, but we manage to sneak in after midnight. Figures start to gather in the shadows around us, and a raspy voice moans: "Does anyone have some dope or sisa?"

"Follow me, please," Hamid says.

We walk down a small road and, after a while, reach a building covered in graffiti. "This is the first place I stayed when I was released from custody," Hamid says. I ask him why he was in jail in the first place. "Documents and passport stuff, what else? That's what everyone in that jail was there for," he answers as a shaky light bulb reveals his missing front tooth. "In Greece, it's far better to be arrested for drugs than for not having a visa."

He continues: "I was incarcerated for 18 months, along with 11 other people. That was when I started learning Greek. The worst thing back then was the fact that only one toilet was functional. But on the other hand, I finally succeeded in getting clean from dope. Eventually I got out, penniless, and a friend suggested I come stay here for a bit."

I look at the wrecked squat and wonder what exactly the point was of renovating the Pedion tou Areos Park. The work was supposed to revitalize the area, but the whole $12 million investment and all the pomp around it just seems to have been entirely pointless. All I can see is a building in really bad shape, surrounded by scrap-metal parts and covered in anti-fascist graffiti.

"We’ve been attacked by members of the Golden Dawn quite a few times. They usually appear out of the blue, accompanied by their dogs, and beat anyone they find. There are 25 to 30 people from Iran and Afghanistan living in this building—all drug users, of course," whispers Hamid, as a group of Afghan men begin to stare at us. "Let’s leave now. We can come back some other day."

We walk by bumper cars and a carousel, which look eerie in the quiet park—like the set of an unreleased Baz Luhrmann horror film. "Some sort of carnival took place here over the past few days, which explains all these," Hamid explains. We're heading towards the "little theater," where the drug dealers hang out after the sun goes down. Sisa costs $7 per crystal, and a gram can cost up to $110 in the Menidi neighborhood, a 20 minute drive from the park.

There's a kind of hierarchy inside the park. Along with the "oldies," who make the pipes and basically run the place, there are the addicts and the casual drug users. Some are regulars and stick around, but others just pass through quickly—grabbing what they came for and leaving straightaway.

Violent disagreements aren't rare around the little theater. Algerians and Africans are the usual suspects, Hamid says, but the the Russians who sell weed in the north are considered equally tough. For whatever reason, Hamid looks unwilling to continue talking about this. "Everything is OK. We're all good friends," he says.

Drug users hang out on the park's benches all through the night, often until the sun comes up. They light fires and sit around, talking endlessly about all kinds of stuff. "Sisa gets you off in a similar way to cocaine, but it messes with your stomach big-time—makes you unable to eat or sleep," says Hamid. A few yards away, some addicts who claim to be detoxing are trying to exchange syringes and pills for heroin or sisa.

We sit down so Hamid can get high. He drops a small crystal inside a glass pipe and heats it with a blowtorch. He exhales the thick smoke almost immediately and starts talking about Shakira. As it turns out, it's not the Shakira I had in mind, but a female friend of his who occasionally hangs out in the park, wearing a weird beret. Nobody can tell how old she is—she could be anywhere between 45 and 65. She usually leaves the park at around 7 in the morning to go home, and then she’s back again after a couple of hours. Hamid believes that, thanks to her drug abuse, she never sleeps, just like most people there.

After a little while, Shakira turns up. She's rude and swears with every other word, her loud voice drowning out everything around us. "I haven’t slept in seven fucking days! I took something that got me high, then leaned on a bench, and some asshole came and pushed me. Guess what, buddy? This bench is not your fuckin’ property!" she shouts.

Another familiar face in the park is 25-year-old Christina, who lives in one of the shipping containers left in the park after its refurbishment. A few days ago, her husband was put in jail, and sometimes she'll sit quietly in the dark and try to write him a letter. She usually just ends up sketching a little heart in the corner of the paper, next to a scrawled "I love you."

Christina is a prostitute and HIV-positive. "You shouldn’t think of me as a classic prostitute—I just trick men into giving me their money and then kick them to the curb," she says. "I’m not like all the others. I’m smarter than that." One night, Christina got so high on a combination of heroin and sisa that she started pretending she was a cat. Some people laughed, some swore at her, and others told her to go home.

According to Hamid, Arab men tend to feel uncomfortable when they meet female drug users in the park, because, in their opinion, "This is not the right place for a woman." When Hamid comes across a woman in Christina's condition, he gives her some drugs for free to stop her from sleeping with random guys to raise the cash for her next fix.

Just next to us, Ali—a 55-year-old man from Afghanistan—won't let me take his picture. "My kids are studying abroad. I wouldn’t want them to see me like this," he says. Ali started using heroin and sisa when he lost his home. "Living here is tough," he sighs. "Could you ever stand staying in a place with no windows? The only thing left for me now is to die."

Every day, 200 to 500 drug users buy their supply in Pedion tou Areos, with some using it to feed their wallet as well as their habit. Yiannis, for example, is a 35-year-old Greek guy who usually buys his drugs in western Greece and then sells them to two or three friends in the park, making between $10 and $30 a deal. "Arab people know pretty well that I’m not a loser. I‘ve got a home, and I’m generally pretty sorted, so they treat me politely," he says. "They even try to teach me the best way to inhale and enjoy sisa."

As he shows me out of the park, I ask Hamid how long it's been since he last saw his mother and brothers. "It’s been quite a while. I really want to see my family again. But I can’t go back to Iran, given the situation," he answers.

He says goodbye and disappears into the bushes. A few cars are now running down Alexandras Avenue, heading towards Patision Street. The sun is about to come up, but things in the park don’t look any better in the daylight.