In 1980 I briefly rented a basement apartment in Athens, Greece (Lycabettus – Kolonaki district). One day while cleaning, I discovered a framed canvas that covered a metal door in one of the walls. It looked like a submarine door with an air lock. I called some friends over to help me open it. We had to remove parts of the wooden floor-boards. The bunker walls were a few feet thick. When we opened the door, we found the evidence of a Nazi torture chamber, which I immediately photographed. The chair with a hole in it was found near the bloody mattress in a corner of the Lycabettus bunker next to a pile of burnt newspaper shreds from the early 1940s featuring articles about the Nazis. A small ball of clay or soil, pressed around the foot of the chair, bewildered us. We later concluded that “feet of clay” were used to psychologically torture a hostage tied to the chair, who was probably ordered not to move, but to remain perfectly still and motionless at all times. Any movement of the chair would cause the clay lump to crumble and break into smaller fragments. The guards could then measure even the slightest movements that had occurred while they were not in the bunker, and punish the hostage accordingly. A hole in the seat of the chair may have been due to an act of extreme violence or a malicious experiment. I sent the photos to the local police department, but they arrived too late. When the authorities finally got there about a month later, I had been evicted and the …
