Pavlos Fyssas

Pavlos Fyssas was born on 10 April 1979 and grew up in Perama, on the western edge of Piraeus. His father worked in the Perama ship-repair zone, and Pavlos himself worked there from 1998 to 2003. In a 2011 interview he said that hip hop had been "the alternative of my time". From the late 1990s he was active in the independent scene of western Piraeus, where hip hop and low bap were flourishing far from record companies. He first belonged to the group Freestyle Productions; after leaving it he called himself Killah P, short for Killah Past, which he explained as "the killer of the past". He also performed as Dogo Argentino.

Shortly after midnight on 18 September 2013, after an evening at a café in Keratsini, he was stabbed by Giorgos Roupakias, a member of the neo-Nazi party Golden Dawn. He died soon afterwards, aged 34. Roupakias was arrested at the scene and confessed. The investigation led to the arrest of Golden Dawn's leaders and to a trial that opened on 20 April 2015. On 7 October 2020 the Athens Criminal Court of Appeals found Roupakias guilty of murder and ruled that Golden Dawn had operated as a criminal organisation. A week later it sentenced him to life imprisonment plus ten years, and the party leader Nikos Michaloliakos to thirteen years. In March 2026 an appeals court upheld the convictions and these sentences.

Fyssas rapped in everyday, often rough street Greek over beats he chose himself; of one instrumental by Dr. Dre he said simply that he liked the beat and rapped on it. Record listings show self-released collections such as Ηλιοκαλέσματα (Calling the Sun, 2005) and Ηλιοκαψίματα (Sunburns, 2012), a 2009 mixtape, and the six-track Το δόγμα το δώμα (The Dogma, the Roof, 2013), a play on two similar-sounding words, shared with the rapper Μετρονόμος on the Rap Monsters label. He also appeared as a guest on records by other Greek rappers, such as Οι παλίρροιες των χρόνων (The Tides of Time, 2007) by Ανδρείκελος.

His main themes, as Culture Minister Myrsini Zorba summarised them in 2018, were the economic crisis, racism towards refugees and migrants, state violence and the hope for a fairer world; his songs also recalled the killings of Alexandros Grigoropoulos in Athens and Carlo Giuliani in Genoa. His titles show his voice. Ο Πειραιάς στην πλάτη μου (Piraeus on My Back) carries his home port like a load, and Σιγά μην κλάψω (As If I'd Cry) uses the ironic Greek σιγά μην, which means the opposite of what it literally says. Asked about his lyrics, he said they were all drawn from experience. In 2020, on what would have been his 41st birthday, Rap Monsters published Save the Date, a collection of his songs.

In November 2015 the municipality of Keratsini-Drapetsona renamed Panagi Tsaldari Street, where he was attacked, as Pavlou Fyssa Street, and a monument stands there. Every 18 September people march in his memory, and his mother, Magda Fyssa, attended the trial hearings for years. Each April, on his birthday, the Cultural Association Pavlos Killah P Fyssas holds the free Rap Monsters Fest, where Greek rappers perform. In 2022 two scientists, Manthos Panou and Spyros Gkelis, named a newly described cyanobacterium Speos fyssasii in his honour.

Try this: look up the title Σιγά μην κλάψω (As If I'd Cry) on Save the Date. Then write three sentences of your own with σιγά μην, such as Σιγά μην αργήσω (As if I'd be late!), and read them aloud with an ironic tone.

• He explained his stage name Killah P as Killah Past, "the killer of the past".
• Before music became central to his life, he worked in the Perama ship-repair zone from 1998 to 2003, like his father.
• The posthumous collection Save the Date came out on 10 April 2020, the day he would have turned 41.
• A cyanobacterium, Speos fyssasii, is named after him; its genus name comes from the Greek σπέος (cave).