Using "forensic architecture" to punch Greek Nazis…in court


In 2013, members of the Greek Nazi movement "Golden Dawn" murdered the antifascist rapper Pavlos Fyssas on the streets of Athens, a murder that was covered up by members of the Greek police, known to be riddled with Golden Dawn infiltrators, and abetted by Members of Parliament from Golden Dawn.


As the case works its way through the Greek courts, the University of London's "Forensic Architecture" group has been called in to make sense of a welter of evidence about the crime and the cover-up, deploying their system of using "architectural techniques and technologies to investigate cases of state violence and violations of human rights around the world."

The result is a 37 minute video that Talos on Metafilter a masterpiece of analytic exposition and impressively recreates the events surrounding the murder based on available data sources — it is.


The Fyssas trial has the potential to bring down Golden Dawn, to bring its true nature as an organized crime group into the open, to eliminate it from the Greek Parliament and to trigger a purge of Nazi elements from the Greek police. It is nothing short of seismic.

But even if you don't care about any of that, this video is remarkable, a stitching-together of disparate and flawed evidence sources in a way that uses the strengths of one to overlap and fix the weaknesses of the other, creating a coherent and devastating story that is as well-told as any crime drama. It is truly virtuoso work.


Much of the original audio and video material was without an accurate timestamp, and it became apparent that attempts by the Greek police investigators to address this problem were insufficient. As a result, our researchers had to assess the material from scratch, and deduce the correct time and location of each piece of footage.

Audio recordings were assembled into a timed sequence through a process of sound analysis. CCTV footage from various locations around the scene was synchronised and given an accurate timestamp by reference to the sequence of audio recordings.


The Murder of Pavlos Fyssas [Forensic Architecture]