The Solidarity Fields

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