The night before Dimitris Christoulas died he sat alone on his balcony, between a large fern and the sliding door that led into his flat.
It was a balmy spring night and the elderly pensioner cut a solitary figure. "His aloneness stood out," said Fani Theodoropoulou, a neighbour who lived opposite. "But he was a gentleman, a good man, of that there is no doubt."
The next day the retired pharmacist – first ensuring his first-floor home was securely locked and balcony doors firmly shuttered – walked down Logothetidi street on which the nondescript apartment block stood and headed for Syntagma square. He had made the decision that would turn him into the symbol of the inequities of Greece's debt crisis.
By 9am, as Athens was beginning to awake, the 77-year-old had shot himself in the head only metres away from the parliament.
Last night, as hundreds continued to pour into the plaza, leaving flowers, flags and handwritten notes at the foot of the pine tree under which he had stood, it was clear that the suicide had taken on a significance that Christoulas may never have imagined. His death prompted vigils, anti-austerity protests and in Athens, clashes between demonstrators and police.
With passions running high, the pine had overnight become a tree of liberty – watered with the blood of its own martyr.
"He chose this place because it was under that tree that he pitched his tent when the aganaktismenoi took over the square last summer," said Nicholas Fotopoulos, a fellow member of the "outraged".
"I remember him well. He'd sit on the bench over there and greet passersby. People feel very angry, very aggrieved because in this man they see how far we have been pushed. He said it in his [suicide] note. He had been pushed to the point where he couldn't survive with dignity on a pension that had been cut to virtually nothing. You tell me, how can anybody survive on virtually nothing?" he asked.
It was a question many had posed in angry notes pinned to the pine. "Down with the junta of the lenders," said one referring to the EU and IMF, the foreign creditors keeping the near-bankrupt Greek economy afloat. "This is not a suicide. It's a political murder," said another.
"I'm quite sure that what he did was about sending a message. He wanted to say 'revolt, take up arms, don't put up with this anymore,'" said Fotopoulos.
Those who knew Christoulas described a decent and dignified man. A committed leftist, he actively participated in citizens' groups such as "I won't pay" which started as a one-off protest against toll fees but quickly turned into a grassroots anti-austerity movement. Neighbours recalled how the divorcee, who lived alone, had hung a banner emblazoned with the words "I won't pay" from his balcony.
"You'd meet Makis in the street and he'd rail about the injustices of our society," said Kostas Angelis, a friend who runs a pharmacy in Ambelokipoi, the neighbourhood where Christoulas lived. "He wasn't a communist or anything like that. He was a progressive man who had spent years away in Switzerland during the [1967-74] junta, and he'd often say 'they don't do things like this abroad. They shouldn't do them here."
Angelis, like others who knew the pensioner well, was in no doubt yesterday that he had taken his life to "shake people up."
"With his suicide he wanted to send a political message," Antonis Skarmoutsos, a friend and neighbour was quoted as saying in the mass-selling Ta Nea. "He was deeply politicized but also enraged."
Only days before his death, the pharmacist had insisted on paying his share of the "common expenses" contributed by residents in the building where he lived although payment was not due for several weeks.
"He was clearly very educated, a man of habit who walked everywhere and didn't smoke and didn't drink," said Giorgos Christopoulos who owns a restaurant where Christoulas would often eat. "He was an exceptional person, very, very decent who was upset with what was happening to Greece."
Ensuring that all his bills were paid was part of the meticulousness that appears to have defined a man who for 35 years – nearly half his life – had faithfully contributed to his pension fund without any "state support".
The state, however, had not kept its side of the social contract. Instead, like so many of Greece's older generation, Christoulas had found himself paying for his country's debts.
The anger that would prompt the pensioner to kill himself is shared by the vast majority of middle-class and low-incomed Greeks who have carried a disproportionate burden of the extraordinarily stringent tax increases, pay and pension cuts meted out to trim budgets in the name of putting Greece on an economically sustainable path.
"He was deeply problematised by it all, the inertia of young people and the situation as it had emerged over the last two years," said Antonis Skarmoutsos his friend. "He would go down to Syntagma to attend protests [held in the square]."
Wittingly or not, the retired pharmacist has become a symbol of resistance to policies that are perceived as not only unfair, but – as Greece sinks further into recession – ultimately self-defeating.