GREECE: To the Showers

Just across Kanellopoulos Street from a small British-owned bleach factory in Piraeus (the port of Athens) stands a building that was once a profitable bordello. Today, fitted with an imposing guard tower at each corner, it is the Greek government's Vourlon Prison, involuntary home of many a condemned member of Greece's outlawed Communist Party, serving time for their parts in Greece's bloody civil war, or for stirring up trouble since then.

One day last week at the bleach factory opposite Vourlon, a watchman's 15-year-old daughter spotted four strangers on the premises, where she lives with her parents. "What are you doing?"...