Villa Amalia was occupied beginning in 1990, which made it one of the oldest squats in Greece by the time it ended. For more than two decades the building functioned as a self-organized social center. Its rooms hosted political debates, film screenings, and concerts - the cultural life of a community that operated outside official institutions and, often, in open opposition to them. To the people who used it, the villa was a space they had built and sustained themselves. To the authorities, it was something else: a place they alleged sheltered violent protesters after the anti-austerity demonstrations that convulsed Athens during the debt crisis.

In December 2012, police evicted Villa Amalia. They said they had found materials for making some 1,500 molotov cocktails inside. The operation was part of a wider government campaign that targeted as many as 40 known squats across Greece, in a period when the crisis had pushed the country's politics to a breaking point. The eviction was not the end of it. Occupants temporarily retook the building before police cleared it again, this time with 92 arrests. In the days that followed, supporters rallied with banners pledging solidarity, briefly occupied the offices of the social-democratic party DIMAR, and blockaded a building where Prime Minister Antonis Samaras was due to speak. The opposition party SYRIZA criticized the eviction, accusing the government of using it to distract from larger scandals. These were charged, contested events, and the people on each side believed they were defending something that mattered.

What becomes of a building once the fight over it ends? In February 2013, the Mayor of Athens, Giorgos Kaminis, announced that Villa Amalia would be turned back into a school or cultural center, and the building was sealed off to prevent it from being reoccupied. The plan held. In September 2016, after renovation, Villa Amalia reopened as a high school - returning, after a quarter-century detour, to the purpose it was originally built to serve. The neoclassical facade that once carried protest banners now watches over students again. For a building that meant such opposite things to opposite people, it was a quiet ending: not a victory for either side, but a return to the everyday business of a city educating its children.