The posh Athenian neighborhood of Kolonaki is a hilly expanse of high-end boutiques, jewelry shops, museums, and art galleries. It’s an area of relatively untouched wealth, and even at the tail end of the Greek financial crisis, there’s enough to celebrate during the holiday season that the neighborhood is adorned with glittering lights and festive wreaths. Those decorations were still up last month when, two days after Christmas, a bomb exploded in front of the district’s Agios Dionysios church.

The bomb, which was hidden inside of a small metallic box placed at the church’s entrance, lightly injured a police officer and a church employee.

Relative to other European countries, Greece has little to fear from religious extremists: The jihadist style of attacks that have rocked most Western and Central European countries in the past years is conspicuously absent. Instead, according to Europol, Greece is the only EU member state that faces an actual threat from left-wing terrorism. In 2017, of the 24 left-wing attacks that occurred across the EU, eight happened in Greece; of the 36 suspects arrested in connection to left-wing terrorism, 12 were charged in Greece.

But “this is a new kind of attack,” Mary Bossis, an associate professor of International Relations at University of Piraeus and an expert on left-wing militancy, told me, referring to the Kolonaki bomb. “We never had attacks against churches before.” The attack—suspected to be the work of anarchists—came just a few days after a powerful blast caused extensive damage to the shared building offices of Skai and Kathimerini, two of the country’s largest media outlets. A little over a week later, on January 7, the American embassy was vandalized with canisters of red paint.

Responsibility for the Skai/Kathimerini bomb was claimed by the Group of People’s Fighters (OLA), one of an unknown number of anarchist-styled groups that utilize showy violence for convoluted reasons. In a statement published online, OLA claimed the bomb was meant to “social-counter violence to the media’s effort to reproduce a xenophobic, far-right and neo-liberal narrative.” That Kathimerini is a left-leaning network critical of the far right did not seem factored in. “It’s violence as performance art,” Brady Kiesling, former U.S. diplomat and author of Greek Urban Warriors told me.