Misleading: Dated protest video from Athens falsely shared as recent unrest
On Sept. 29, a video purportedly showing a large riot in Athens, Greece, was posted on X. Part of the caption read, “The Greek capital is on fire —people everywhere have simply had enough,” implying that the protest took place shortly before the video was uploaded.
The video consists of four scenes edited together. It shows a crowd dressed in black gathering near Syntagma Square and the Hellenic Parliament as fire and a billowing plume of dark smoke rise nearby. The post has garnered over 4,200 likes and 1,400 reposts.
However, this claim is misleading. Annie Lab found no protests with clashes on a comparable scale around the time of posting.
The footage actually shows violent clashes in the city on Feb. 28, 2025, the second anniversary of the country’s deadliest train crash, in which a passenger train and a freight train collided head-on near Tempi, killing 57 people.
The earliest version of this video we could find was posted on Feb. 28, 2025 (archived here), the same day as the protest with the Greek hashtag “#28_Φλεβαρη(#28_February).
It was posted by Hüseyin Dogru, an independent journalist and documentary filmmaker who adds a logo to his work that reads “red.” (revolutionary educational documentaries). This logo appears in the top-right corner of the viral video, which can be seen in his other work posted on his personal website.
The first scene (0:00 – 0:03) shows a fireball exploding behind a stone wall in front of a packed crowd. Based on visual clues including the Hotel Grande Bretagne, a kiosk, and the stone wall, we geolocated the area to Leoforos Vasilissis Sofias (or Vasilissis Sofias Avenue), near its intersection with Panepistimiou Street.
A keyword search for that day’s clashes led to an ABC News video that includes a clip showing the same explosion at the same location from another angle.
Annie Lab also found a Getty Images photo (archived here) taken during the protest that shows a man who appears in the video’s third scene, wearing dark pants, a heavy black jacket with white stripes on the sleeves, and a black ski mask.
Recent protests
The most recent protests Annie Lab found in Athens before the video was posted on X took place on Sept. 16.
According to the Greek outlet Millet News (archived here), students and civil servants held separate, smaller-scale demonstrations to oppose constitutional amendments proposed by the government.
Reuters published photographs of public-sector workers protesting against the constitutional revisions that day.
We found no news coverage of clashes of a similar scale around the time of the post.
Other clips from February 2025 protests have also been shared misleadingly as recent unrest in Athens. Full Fact, Euronews, Reuters, and Lead Stories have published fact-checks on similar claims.
