Just outside of Athens, a group of displaced people have built a farm that serves as an alternative to the indignity of refugee camps. Led by the enigmatic Kastro, this experiment in off-grid living has created a space in which everyone has an equal stake, all the while shining a light on the deep-rooted connection between food and freedom.
Text:AlexKing
EMBERS RISE INTO THE NIGHT SKY. Kastro reaches a hand into the tall stone oven to light his cigarette. With a shovel, he makes room for the loaves of bread he has been preparing. In between drags of a cigarette, he sings folk ballads in both Greek and Arabic as he pours ingredients into a deep plastic mixing bowl: flour, butter, tahini, red wine, black sesame, sugar, wild honey and sunflower seeds – most of which has been grown on the farm that surrounds us, now all but invisible despite the glow of the full moon.
There are currently around 100,000 refugees in Greece, and almost half are living in horrendous camps that have been locked down and largely abandoned due to the coronavirus pandemic. But just outside the small village of Plataea, a 60-minute drive from Athens, lies an alternative to that indignity. Known as the Solidarity Fields, this experiment in rural self-organisation began in 2016, when Kastro and a group of others came together to rent a patch of abandoned land so that they could begin cultivating their own food. The project quickly snowballed. Today, rather than relying on charity, many families from Syria, Iraq, Palestine and beyond live on the farm, participating equally in work and decision-making, while growing enough produce to feed themselves and other similar projects in Athens.
Kastro is something of a mythical figure among Athens’ refugee solidarity movement. He was born Suleiman Dakdouk in 1969 in Tartus, on Syria’s Mediterranean coast. Aged just 13, he discovered Marxism, joined a left-wing group which opposed Hafez al-Assad’s brutal Ba’athist regime, and was expelled from school after protesting against mandatory military drills. At 16, he was tortured by Assad’s security services and had two nails ripped out with a coin. He then went on to fight in Lebanon alongside the Palestine Liberation Organisation, before growing disillusioned with the war and returning to Damascus to study at the School of Fine Arts.
In the aftermath of the 1982 Hama massacre – Assad’s response to a Muslim Brotherhood-led uprising – the Syrian regime was clamping down on opposition groups. To avoid being conscripted into the army, Kastro hid in a camp for Palestinian refugees i
