Christos Constantinidis

Christos Constantinidis (1950–1994) was the founder of the "Diethnis Vivliothiki" ("International Library") publishing collective in Athens. Starting around 1971, during the military junta's rule in Greece, he published classic anarchist and Situationist texts by Bakunin, Kropotkin, Volin, Thoreau, Debord and others, as well as modern libertarian works (Jerry Rubin's Do It!, Abbie Hoffman's Revolution For The Hell of It, Timothy Leary's Politics of Ecstasy, etc.). During the 1970s and 1980s, thirteen issues of Pezodromio, the collective's periodical, were published.

In 1973, he took part with his comrades in the students' anti-junta protests. They were among the first who started the Polytechnic Uprising in Athens on November 14, and tried to radicalise it. Their graffiti "Down with the state" and "Down with the capital" adorned the Polytechnic's gates for a day before being covered with more "pragmatic" slogans by other left-wing students who arrived later. The Uprising was brutally put down by the army three days later.

Between 1974 and 1983 Constantinidis was involved in solidarity campaigns, propaganda and direct action as well as publishing work. He was persecuted and imprisoned repeatedly for his beliefs. He was a friend of Murray Bookchin, Noam Chomsky and other libertarians. In the mid-1980s, disillusioned with the direction of the Greek anarchist movement, he moved to Crete to lead a quiet life closer to nature.

His premature death in 1994 saddened friends and comrades all over Greece and abroad.