On the morning of July 23, 1996, a group of EKAM (ie SWAT team) stormed Christoforos’ cabin. The police and the PASOK government immediately announced that the anarchist Marinos had committed suicide.
That evening we crossed paths in the square with a veteran former comrade of his. He was considered to be the toughest of the cell that had held the titles of the Anarchist Union. He told me, “better this way, otherwise he would have ended up in a mental hospital.” The state got rid of a constant political threat and thus relieved many of the precariousness of their compromises.
At that time I was a young anarchist, hyperactive, but still inexperienced with “serious” action, I had closely coexisted on the street with all the divisions of the former Union and had broken away from them all, suspicious of all the commanders but with a mutually cordial friendship with Christoforos. The then recent history of organized anarchism was the legacy with which I started and from which I had already separated when I got associated with Christoforos. The various fragments of the anarchist organization proved incapable of differentiating themselves from the denouncing role of anti-authoritarian alternativism and activism.
Some time later, a comrade asked me to keep the file of the lawsuit that a group of lawyers had prepared for the murder of Christoforos. It was about 80 pages that documented that it was a police murder that was covered up by the government, the judiciary and “the movement”. The legal investigation exposed the state, PASOK in particular and the agents of human rights advocacy, some of whom had taken on the responsibility of whitewashing the state murder, either in person or with a political stamp, and who later became the pawns of the government left of capital. Along with this, it also exposed the counter-revolutionary anti-authoritarians who had settled for the suicide version. The team of lawyers wimped out. The lawsuit was buried before it was filed. It happened to fall in my hands for safekeeping. It is out there somewhere.
Christoforos lives in the weapons of anarchy, which will never be silenced until the destruction of the state.
Memory is a weapon loaded with the responsibility of the future.
Our promise is, we will build the international anarchist revolutionary organization that our time requires. Christoforos, we will go all the way, with you.
July 23, 2026
Dimitris Chatzivasileiadis
Domokos Prison