Does a video show a mass rally in Greece in 2026? No, that's not true: The footage is more than a year old -- it was published on X and aired on Italian TV on Feb. 28, 2025, at a demonstration marking the second anniversary of a deadly train crash. Greece did see protests on the day the video went viral, but directed at U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who was visiting the country -- not the mass rally shown in the video.
The claim appeared in a post (archived here) published on X by @realgerhardtvdm on Oct. 6, 2026. It opened:
THE MEDIA IS SILENT ON THIS AGAIN: Massive protest erupting in Greece, everything in the country is at a stand still.
This is what the video attached to the post looked like on X at the time of writing:
(Image source: post by @realgerhardtvdm on X.)
On the day of the post's publication, Greece witnessed (archived here) protests against U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio visiting the country, but the footage in question did not document anything that happened in the fall of 2026.
The video had been online since Feb. 28, 2025, when it was published (archived here), for example, on X. On the same day, the footage appeared in the video report by Italian TV channel La7 (archived here). It covered a demonstration in Greece (archived here and here) that took place at the second anniversary of a deadly train crash:
(Image source: La7; the screenshot was automatically translated to English by Chrome.)
Similar still images of the rally could be found on stock photo databases, for example, here (archived here).
As reported by Euronews (archived here), the same video reviewed in this fact check was shared on social media under captions falsely suggesting it showed protests against migration.
Shortly after, the same footage was falsely claimed to capture (archived here and here) people chanting "Russia" in Romania.
