The hundred-drachma coins
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The hundred-drachma coins were the improvised missiles used against the American embassy in Athens during John Kiriakou's posting there, described by him on the DeProgram programme in July 2025 while explaining what it was like to serve in Greece in 1999, the year of the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia.

The annual closure

One evacuation was scheduled. "Every year we have to vacate the embassy on the 17th of November because it's the date of the uprising against the military junta that we installed," Kiriakou says. A large demonstration marches from the Polytechnic University, where the uprising began, to the American embassy, and the response was standing procedure: "we just shut the whole place down at 12 and everybody goes home. You just get a half a day off."

1999 was not a normal year. "We evacuated the American embassy at least a dozen times that year because these demonstrations were absolutely gigantic," he says.

The coins

The detail Kiriakou dwells on is the currency, and the timing. Greece had not yet converted to the euro, and the largest circulating coin was well suited to the purpose: "they had these 100 drachma coins that were about the size of an Eisenhower silver dollar ... and so you could fling them and they had some heft to them."

He is precise about what was being thrown away. The coins "were worth about a quarter, 27 cents," and demonstrators "would smash all the windows on the front of the embassy."

The paint

A second wave followed. "They would fill balloons with red paint and with slingshots launch the red balloons," so that "the next day the embassy is just peppered with red paint splotches and the windows are all broken from 100 drachma coins."

Kiriakou offers no complaint about the politics behind the demonstrations, whose grievance, an American-installed junta, he states as fact in the same breath. His summary of the experience is only that "it was awful. It was miserable."

See also

- The Yugo factory argument
- John Kiriakou
- Kiriakou's Athens house
- The Greek Orthodox Church
