Guerillas In The Mist
December 12, 2008 @ 5:00 AM
In a country, where the scene is as small, fragile and scattered as in Greece, Propaganda is on the top of the list of ingredients in the amalgam holding it all together. From the very beginning, Hari has recruited veterans and kids from all over the country. Although the company is based in Thessaloniki, the team isn’t necessarily centred around the second biggest city in Greece. “From the beginning I’ve tried to make up a team that doesn’t necessarily come from Athens or Thessaloniki. I’ve tried to find kids that have potential and really love skateboarding and I want to give them the opportunity to progress in skateboarding. It’s about a fellowship, not about one kid in each town so I can put their name on the ad.”
The graveyard of skate companies is crammed with half-baked ideas, where a self-taught designer started the business from his bedroom merely to have a semi official canvas for his creations, or some bighearted fool wanted to hook his friends up, put everyone on the team and spent his pocket money on the first edition of boards that quickly turned into the last edition. Propaganda wasn’t born out of vanity or false promises. It was born out of obsession. “I think skateboarding is like a disease. If you start skating, you cannot stop. This is the main reason that all of us are in this business. I had this dream and I wanted to make it come true. I started learning business and finding out about the resources and thinking about a name for the company.“
10 years ago, the Greek skateboarding scene was very heavily centred in Athens. There would be the odd skater here and there in other cities as well, but as the industry and distributors were all in Athens, the kids elsewhere would be a lot more likely to give up skating in favour of something else. “If kids don’t get enough support, it’s really hard for them to stick with skateboarding as they progress later on in life. You know, they have to work, they have to go to the army…” Compared to many other countries around Europe, the general skateboarding public on the Peloponnesos peninsula is still relatively young. But at the very least, the kids now have something to aspire to with Hari’s team of home-grown pros a living, rolling proof that skating is not just something you do for a bit before getting into clubs and drugs and real-estate.
