Upstream - Sneak Peak: Loukanikos the Riot Dog (Yianni Litovchenko)

Episode Date: June 21, 2016

In this Upstream Sneak Peak, Yianni Litovchenko of Alternative Tours of Athens tells us the story of the famous Greek riot dog Loukankios (or "Sausage").

You're listening to an upstream sneak peek with Yanni Litovchenko, a tour guide of alternative tours in Athens. also an interesting here is um um you've noticed there's a lot of big fat old dogs sleeping on the sidewalks here all over the place like this in front of some restaurant usually so what happened was when um right before the olympic games before the olympic games generally athens and greece had a pretty big problem with homeless animals, right? That was never taken care of, the issue. But once, you know, they start preparing for the Olympic Games, they're like, okay, oh my God, you know, all these tourists and foreigners are going to come here and see this. All these homeless dogs and cats, we have to do something.

So, of course, they start gathering, collecting all the homeless dogs and cats and capturing them. And, of course, you know, politicians being politicians, easy way out, put them to death. So the activists started protesting this. And so, so you know they finally had a dialogue the activists you know animal rights organizations and so forth with politicians and they found a compromise that throughout the olympic games they would keep all the animals in quarantine and during this period of time you know they make sure that they they in good medical situation. They're all sterilized. They've got computer chips, collars. They're taken care of.

They don't have no diseases. They've been given the medical treatment they need. And then after the Olympic Games were over, they basically dropped these animals out in different places of the city. So they take a dog and they drop one dog off in front of these couple of bars here. They drop off another dog in front of that cafe there. So basically the dog would become adopted by these local businesses. So the local businesses would provide the dog with water and food. And the dog just sleeps outside of the restaurant. The clients also feed the dog. So you know, the better, the more of

a meat restaurant it is, the fatter the dog gets out. So basically they're homeless dogs, but they have a decent life. And this is where the story comes from, that some bars in Athens, when it gets really cold in the winter, let the dogs sleep inside the bar. Because these are the dogs that are sitting outside of the bar every day anyways. And so one of these dogs was lucky enough, or unlucky enough, to get dropped off right here on this corner. So right away he was adopted by these anarchist kids that were hanging out that always hang out on this corner and um the government officials and that whole system that was quarantined the olympic games and so forth

they gave all the animals names so they gave this dog the name theodore and he wasn't the most he was like a mixed breed dog so he wasn't the best looking dog had a little weird face disproportionate but you know i'm normal dog so he gets dropped off here and the anarchists start feeding him sausages so they decided to rename him and then um they called him lucanicus which means sausage in greek and because he was living here with them and they're the first ones to go down to every demonstration and ride up front against the police they're the ones attacking the police they're the ones looking for conflict of police and he was always with them so he became a mascot of Exarche and the anti-authoritarian movement.

And you could see there's loads of videos online of him, because he would run and attack the police, and he'd breathe in all the tear gas like he didn't care. And there was even a bar in Barcelona named after him, and there was a fan page, some guy in the States made a fan page about him. One of the most beautiful videos on YouTube is one year there was um the firemen had a demonstration and a strike in Athens and the firemen had a huge demonstration and it gets really violent between the firemen and the police so you see firemen and police fighting each other in a like riot

demonstration and Lucani goes this dog running around in the middle barking away the riot police from the firemen so unfortunately last year he passed away after many years of participating in demonstrations he had very serious lung problems from all the tear gas and the pepper spray he ended up over the years getting so yeah he passed away last October that's why if you go to Psyri where the Ambrose Theatre I told you about is, on the one corner of Ambrose Theater is Sari Street, which has a lot of street art. It has one of the really well-organized murals

that were one of the big projects done to really promote street art here. And on that one corner, there's a huge wall, like a memorial painted to him, with him and all the fires in the background and so forth. The riot dog. with him and all the fires back in the background and so forth. Lukányi goes the right way..