THE SUNDAY TIMES: Seldom do Greek academics attain the heroic status that was bestowed last week on Christos Kittas, an eminent professor of pathology and rector of Athens University.
More comfortable in front of a whiteboard Kittas, a wiry figure with grey hair and a silver beard, found himself on the front line in what looked like a war zone.
From his palatial office on the first floor of the university, he organised a “human chain” of colleagues to defend the historic building from being ransacked in Greece’s worst street violence in decades.
“I’m terrified,” he confided on Friday as yet another column of demonstrators filed past the building, screaming abuse at police – “killers in uniform” – for having shot dead a teenager six days before.
“I haven’t slept in days now,” he added, sitting beneath oil paintings of previous rectors going back to the 1830s.
Downstairs, other teachers had formed a line on the steps to prevent hardcore demonstrators from breaking into the building and using it, as they had done previously, as a base from which to hurl Molotov cocktails and stones at police.
A week of protests and rioting by students venting fury over the death of 15-year-old Alexandros Grigoropoulos has thrown Greece into turmoil, causing hundreds of millions of pounds of damage and focusing attention on economic, political and social woes. >>> Matthew Campbell | Sunday, December 14, 2008
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