Umbrella Greek Division! Resident Evil’s Umbrella Corp’s Greek division, facing all zombies! They talk to us about Reenacting, the team, their actions and the halt of their activities!
ARE YOU WITH UMBRELLA ?
From September 9, 2012 to April 6, 2014, they were spreading fear and terror among zombies everywhere in Athens and Thessaloniki, Greece! The Greek division of the biohazard countermeasure service U.B.C.S. by Umbrella Corp from Resident Evil, Umbrella Greek Division!
Light Troopers, Heavy Troopers, Anti Contamination Service, Scientists and of course Zombies! The only team in the Greek Cosplay scene which was essentially focused on reenactment!
We met them occasionally at various Cosplay events in Athens and Thessaloniki as visitors or as an attraction in their own area with various related themed objects decorating their place, with the team immersing itself into the full representation of their role as a biohazard countermeasure service against zombies, not excluding the public’s participation. During various events, they also delivered Zombie Survival Lessons on stage!
But what happened to the team? No, it has nothing to do with the fall of Umbrella Corp, nor with the hordes of zombies! Let’s talk with Alex Antonakis, founder of Umbrella Greek Division, in detail about everything!
Photo by SpirosK Photography
Find Umbrella Greek Division on the following media! Facebook - Youtube
UMBRELLA BIOHAZARD COUNTERMEASURE SERVICE !
1) Tell us a few words about Umbrella Greek Division! What do we need to know about you? How many members did the team include?
First, I’m very happy for your invitation, which awakens memories in me of joy, but also of endless stress, which you reminded me of after so many years! But let’s get to the point, to give answers to some hot questions, which our fanatic fans, and not only, are waiting for, haha! The team’s inception came mainly by me as Alex thanks to my love for Resident Evil and airsoft, while already being a cosplayer for a long time until that point of time. I spotted an Italian team, Umbrella Italian Division, which impressed me, since it was doing something very different from all other teams worldwide at that time. It started in 2009, if I remember correctly. They tried to do, as they called it, a faithful reenactment, putting the term sci-fi up front in an innovative way, the company Umbrella Corp, as it appeared in the second film, Resident Evil: Apocalypse, depicting and focusing mainly on the company and its various units ( with minimal visual conversions ), unlike any other type of Umbrella Corp mash up done with cosplayers around the world. For many years they piqued my interest, so I decided to visit them then, as an honorary member, when I was invited to Lucca Comics & Games in Italy in 2012, to discuss the creation of a sister team in Greece, which would be faithful to their vision! Returning to Greece, I started “recruiting”, finding people mainly from the airsoft scene, since it was a somewhat more demanding and expensive hobby compared to cosplay, and then at the end of 2012 we already had 6 members and a professional makeup artist! My dear Xenia Karabekiou, who was excellent from the first moment she left her studies and with whom we have a very good relationship until today!
2nd Game Festival – Photo by Anthony David
2) When and how did you get started with Reenactment and what got you into it? What led to the formation of your team? What was your first appearance and first characters?
Initially, the term reenactment didn’t exist in Greece as a proper term until then, while even now it sounds a bit strange for me to be saying that. We may have been probably the first ones to promote it seriously in Greece, since, as you know, even now, there are usually very few serious efforts in this sector in Greece, while surprisingly in all the countries around Greece it’s something that’s done systematically for years now and on a large scale. So, let’s rewind again. While being into airsoft, and having done some cosplays in between, I was invited in a World War II reenactment through airsoft games. I had chosen to create an authentic parachute suit of the 101st american airborne division. The goal was to play in modified airsoft games based on existing types of World War II battles. We had Americans, British and Germans, I remember a total of 30 people. All this made me get into and appreciate reenacting, collecting replicas, but also feeling through all that the same way the one you represent would have felt, dozens of years ago. Anyone who has done it understands what I’m saying and it’s something that no Costume-Play enthusiast can experience, no matter what he might claim, no pun intended hahahaha. In this scene I happened to find people like Giorgos Tsitouris, Kostas Petratos, Giannis Likoudis, Spiros Papadopoulos, Giorgos Bessas, Giannis Skalidis, Iliana Koukliti and Stelios Raziel Cain as key members, but also members who passed through the team and stayed for a while or were either seasonal, if I ‘m excused to use that term, Anthimos Fliagas, Irini Giouleka, Charalambos Oikonomou, Vangelis Fasoulis, Alexandros Danazoglou, and finally our large army of zombies that we hosted in every event or project. As for the formation of the team, it took place at the end of 2012 as I mentioned, with us chosing to introduce and do something different in the scene and thus shake the waters of the Greek Cosplay scene hahaha. Bringing display aspect happenings to Greek events in that way. Our first appearance, if I remember correctly, was at the Zombie Thriller Party at Ghost House in Gazi in early 2013, which was about zombies. We were performing security duties, so to speak, so that there would be order among the hordes of the living dead hahaha. Something you would often see us doing in the future!
2nd Game Festival – Photo by Umbrella Greek Division
3) Your team’s theme was Resident Evil. What kind of characters or costume types did you choose? Were those choices based on personal interests, and if so, when did you get in contact with them before the team’s creation?
Choosing to do what we did, we had to look into some existing costume categories of the various Umbrella Corp units that were in the second Resident Evil movie ( which had major differences from the game ). On one hand we had the combat units of the company codenamed U.B.C.S. ( Umbrella Biohazard Countermeasure Service ), which were getting the biggest attention and were the front of our team and which were something like a security / commando / riot police. On the other hand we had the non-combat units, which consisted of the company’s scientists and shareholders ( something that many teams kept forgetting about abroad ), the biological accident recovery units and finally our favorite zombies. What would a Resident Evil team be without the living dead anyway haha! Υou are going ask me, and it makes a lot of sense, cool, but where are the famous game characters? Is Resident Evil possible without Claire & Chris Redfield, Jill Valentine, Leon S. Kennedy and Albert Wesker? Ehh yes it is, I’ll tell you, we made it and the result was satisfactory hahahaha! We wanted to prevent a possible increased visibility that a well-known character would get and to direct that attention towards the whole team in order to provide a better atmosphere of realism!
Photos by SpirosK Photography
4) Which characters do you think were the most popular What were the most difficult costumes you have done? What made them the most difficult?
Naturally, the characters who were more popular were the heavily armed Security Guards ( also known as Heavy Troopers ), because they were usually in full gear with huge weapons or riot shields, but were also characterized by a full face cover with masks, helmets and glasses, with the last component being a microphone, which they used to communicate through their mask and which we connected to an MP3 player that occasionally played some radio chatter from the enemy cops of the game Half Life 2. Especially those specific members had to have a huge amount of patience, but also acting ability, as not to break their act while beating or being beaten by the zombies hahaha! Let’s leave the financial cost of the costumes for later hahaha!
Feature Video of Umbrella Greek Division – Video by Umbrella Greek Division
5) What do you think about ready-made Cosplays? Were they part of your ensemble as well?
The thing I remember is that the Greek Cosplay scene was surprised and received us at first with a bit of skepticism, as far as I can say. Not that we cared about it to tell you the truth, since the public got to love us soon enough, giving us a very high status compared to the rest of the Cosplay scene. I was already a long time in the Cosplay scene ( oh it’s liberating to talk like that after years haha, although I never changed ), as I already mentioned the term reenactment was very new in the Greek scene and everyone was thinking “what do they want with their ready-made costumes?”, “this is cosplay, they should go somewhere else”, “cosplay means being handmade” ( tell me again who was the elitist and who was gatekeeping hahahaha ). In reenactment, however, they aren’t necessarily not handmade. I could say that they are MAINLY handmade, for example check medieval and whatever other type of reenactment you like all over the world. It’s just that, from one era onwards, I could say World War I and onwards, the costume creating is still in the hands of the war clothing industry, so it’s much easier to find, collect and wear them, like the ones we were wearing. In other words, you don’t need to sit down and sew police equipment, not that you can’t or that I didn’t try!
Comicdom Con Athens 2014 – Photo by Umbrella Greek Division
6) How much effort, time and money does it usually take to create or get a Cosplay? What was the most common plan and methods you used to create or get a Cosplay?
From the beginning, as a team, we tried to organize ourselves with statutes and rules, a plan to collect costumes and even a plan on how each member should act out his role. I would say that typically a Heavy Trooper suit cost 700 euros if I remember correctly, plus the purchase of an airsoft replica, which was also classified in some kind of category of uniformity. Whenever an upcoming member showed interest in joining the team, we required that he played the part of a zombie at an event, to see if he was interested in coming through, but most importantly, to show some good acting. This was something very important for us. Beside that, the collection of objects was mainly done by me, either by visiting military shops in Athens, or through online shopping. Better not remember how much gray matter I lost looking for offers and covering miles to get them haha! But at the same time I won’t forget many people who we unfortunately rejected , since they wanted to join the team with their own gear and we had to explain to them why that wasn’t possible. I hope they didn’t hold any hard feelings. To give you an idea, an airsoft replica could cost up to 500 euros and we wouldn’t even play airsoft with it! It was just for events, something like having an expensive car and only bringing it to car shows haha ( we’re talking about crazy spending by all of us ).
eGaming: Digital Christmas – Photo by Niki L. Photography
7) Did you consider your involvement with Reenactment a hobby or something more serious? How did that define the way you presented your work? Was roleplaying a core part of it?
First of all we loved what we did. If there is no love nurturing a hobby, then it’s better not to do it at all, since you’ll be wasting time and money. But love also introduces seriousness in what you do so that you’ll give it the attention it needs. Roleplaying is the most important factor in reenactment worldwide. To make you understand, while we were wearing a costume we never went out of character, something difficult for a cosplayer, since people will stop him to talk to him, congratulate him on his costume and exchange views. As for us, when someone stopped us to talk to us about our costumes, even our biggest fan, we told him that he was bothering us during work hours, and if he could to please step aside, because we would get violent, and that we were carrying out orders. That was our secret and we made people get into it more! Now let me talk about the second part of reenactment, about immersion! We had to offer a backdrop to the public to make them experience being in another reality for a while, that the zombies, yes, are real, that we are here to protect them under real conditions and with real equipment ( that’s what we wanted them to believe anyway, because Umbrella Corp heeeeello hahahaha ). You can’t imagine how we felt when someone shouted at us “sold out murderers, you destroyed Raccoon City, it’s all your fault” hahaha! This was for us both success and happiness! What can one say, you just saw someone say it with passion, with all his might! And then you let him hold the gun to get more into it or hit one of the zombies! You don’t get that in Cosplay, no matter how many prizes you have ( and yes, the whole situation also had fighting, hahahaha, what do you think you need the protective equipment for anyway )! To give a shocking example, in a survival sketch, we broke the chin of our zombie Michalis due to a fall, who didn’t even drop the role due to being into frenzy and after the sketch we got him to the emergencies hahaha.
Photos by SpirosK Photography
8) How did you feel the first time you appeared in public or at an event as a team? Describe your experience to us.
The first time was very stressful for us naturally. It was our first time after all, as with all first times in anything hahaha! We wondered if we would be able to convince people. Will they believe us? It was back then at the party at Ghost House, and they were cursing us from below hahaha! We had wasted Leon S. Kennedy unfairly, they shouted at us hahahahaha! Needless to say, we received applications for new team members on the very next day! It was enough to put the public into an immersion. Were were resting on the street and the passing policemen asked us if we were on a break from our service hahahaha! Eeeh after a while we started drinking and as expected we got loose … what immersion and nonsense … our shift on service was over and we got drunk hahaha!
Zombie Survival Lesson by Umbrella Greek Division at GameAthlon 2013 – Video by Umbrella Greek Division
9) How did you end up attending Cosplays events intensively and what experiences did you get from it?
It didn’t take long to get some noise happening around our name, we had surprised a lot of people! We sold a product, to put it that way, that was unprecedented in the Greek scene. Υou would usually see an organizer, whenever he hosted an event, bring a couple of lads for a cheap part-time job at best. The usual thing was to receive some present at the end and dress them up as mascots for the event, so that there would be something present with whatever was available, excluding events which had Cosplay as an attraction of course. So with tactical moves, and then invitations due to fame, we became regulars at events for the next 2 years.
GameAthlon 2013 – Photo by Umbrella Greek Division
10) You attended various events as an exhibitor and attraction. Tell us about the content you exhibit at your area and your activities as attractions. How did people treat you and what impact did you notice regarding your work at events? Were you generally satisfied with people’s response to your work all these years?
To clarify, our team was non-profit, not having any financial requirement for our presence. Something you didn’t see often in the scene from other groups that did it “out of love”. With a total team budget of over 10 thousand euros, we had made display items, such as small machine guns, sandbags, biohazard protective tapes, even a cage to put our zombies in, to let the public play! We also offered zombie transformation makeup to the public on behalf of our makeup artist and with the products offered by the company Kryolan Hellas! A little later, we offered an option for donations by offering various Umbrella Corp pendants. I still know well-known youtubers who wear our pendants. But what everyone knew and was surprised by at the first events, but later couldn’t wait for, was the survival lesson in case of a zombie apocalypse by our scientist and our zombies, on stage. It was usually at the beginning of a Cosplay Contest, while some other times it was purely our happening. The public’s applause was what made us believe that what we did with effort and passion and savings was worth it and move on to achieve something even better!
GameAthlon 2013 – Photo by Umbrella Greek Division
11) You have attended events in Athens, but also in Thessaloniki. Was there a difference that grabbed your attention you between the two cities related to them?
Unfortunately we went to Thessaloniki only once and to be exact as a test run with few members who didn’t continue in the establishment of the team, on September 2012 at eGaming 2012 at the Thessaloniki International Fair! It was an amazing event, but unfortunately we weren’t given the opportunity to go again, due to the fact that the cost of such an endeavor was unbearable for the whole team and unfortunately it was impossible for the respective organizer to support that cost, so we just did what we did in the capital haha! Certainly Thessaloniki has another kind of glamor, I spent several years spending vacations there, I personally attended many events there in my other uniforms, I met friends and close friends with whom we’ve been together for years and who are with me in Scotland, where we are as immigrants ( yes unfortunately Greece keep me there ). So yes, Thessaloniki for me personally, but also for many others, is pure love. I don’t know why, but Thessaloniki will always be a young and adolescent city and it’s a pity that we couldn’t attend another event there as a team. But I have other memories to recall and that’s enough for me!
Photo by SpirosK Photography
12) Did the theme and size of an event ever affect your decision to visit and dress up at them as a team? What would you say were your favorite events so far?
It definitely played a role. Unfortunately, at events in Athens lots of times the available space was tragically small and this wouldn’t change for many years. AthensCon had to appear to show the Athenian public how proper European events happen. Unfortunately, I’m talking about Comicdom Con Athens, where we were never given the opportunity to attend and exhibit, although I still love the organization’s guys, and whatever they did, they did it with passion, non-profitable like us, and I also started as a volunteer there. But we didn’t reach an agreement on space, so we just went over to have some fun with people outside and to get to eat and drink later. I won’t hide the fact that we were a little saddened by this, but also me personally, because we really wanted to support the effort of the guys who ran Comicdom Con Athens. Two of our members, me and Giannis, have been volunteers there for a long time, but unfortunately the available space wasn’t enough for something more. This was something that damaged events in Athens for many years, because there wasn’t any money to rent large places like abroad. When your economy as a country is in disarray, what do you need culture for? To mention something funny here, there was an event on which we wasted time and money to go, and they banned our zombies, with it being a core element of our team, because it was Christmas and we would be scaring the kids … don’t try to make sense of it, we are a mess as a country. The event was eGaming: Digital Christmas at Helexpo in Athens and it turned out to be a fiasco, and it wasn’t even the organizer who was to blame for that, who supported us and who we helped! I’m talking, of course, about our long-term collaboration with CowboyTV and Andreas Derdemezis, at whose events we were regulars for a long time. I knew Andreas before and he believed in us and had a great understanding of what it means to provide something like this for free to the public, in order to keep their interest turned to your place! Anyway, our favorite event was the 2nd Gaming Festival in Gazi, Athens! A favorite event for all of us with the best sketch on stage until then! We had reached our peak as a team at that point. At this event I also met my close friend Giorgos Karetas, who took the longest interview of us for the Youtube channel he had with some other friends ahahaha!
Zombie Survival Lesson by Umbrella Greek Division at Zombie Thriller Party 2013 – Video by Umbrella Greek Division
13) What led to the halt of the group’s activities in the end?
As anyone can understand, being at the top leads to the fall, sometimes slowly, and sometimes quickly and abruptly. Unfortunately there was a long absence of events for quite some time at the end of 2014, if I remember correctly. Even GameAthlon had deteriorated with GameAthlon 2015, where we couldn’t even fit in to attend, without having an event to go for a long time. At Comicdom Con Athens, as I mentioned before, we couldn’t anyway. We really believed that the end of Greek events was near. We didn’t know until then that at the end of 2015 Andreas Pefanis would appear with AthensCon, which took the Greek scene into new heights, and f…ed everything haha! A proper European / American event with everything included! As you can understand, Umbrella Greek Division was all we thought about from one point onwards, it was our daily life, our life itself, and for many this isn’t the best or healthiest thing there is. You can take all this as a confession and I don’t care if I’m judged. They judged us in the community back then, because we had succeeded, let them judge us a little more now too, nothing wrong here. During the daily friction there will be happy times, but also disagreements. Anyone who says that this isn’t true has either never experienced it, is either a liar or hasn’t made any real relationships with other people. With most of the members of the team we were something like brotherly friends, we slept and woke up together, ate together, drank together and generally partied non-stop for many years. We didn’t care how we could win a contest or about prizes we would get or how we could badmouth each other in a community where everyone was doing it everywhere, but how we would do what we enjoyed doing, play our part, have fun with the public, and then drink our beers and move on with our lives as brothers. And it still saddens me today, after so many years, that we never talked about what we had accomplished, how much we had invested and suffered, and just one day we threw it all away for something trivial, a trailer with an airsoft team that didn’t work out, and we let it die, because we were all just too proud to take a step back and sort things out. As you can see it’s just another everyday and true story like all the others, where someone who reads it may identify with, so I have nothing to be ashamed of. I still talk to some, to others more and to others less, but I always try as much as possible to find out if they are at least ok with whatever they moved on and wherever they are.
Disco Boogie Halloween Party – Photo by Umbrella Greek Division
14) Were there any plans for the future that you didn’t manage to realize? Was there a long term goal or personal dream you wanted to achieve?
Yes, there was something in the works. We were invited from abroad to shoot for a movie with zombies, which would be shot in Athens, and they asked for a SWAT team that would get involved with the zombies. We were contacted by a good friend of mine who had started a very innovative effort in Greece, the sale of collectibles In Case Of Display Cases. Unfortunately, the suggestion came shortly after we broke up, and when I saw the result of the shooting with some guys made to wear whatever equipment they could find, I was pulling my hair while watching it! Apart from that, if I really knew what Andreas Pefanis was preparing for next winter with AthensCon, maybe things would be have been very different now. We had a mutual friend Giannis Paraskevopoulos from the legendary No Label X, former Fantasy Shop Exarcheion, and the first thing he did was ask about us, if we could go, not knowing that we were inactive by then … that’s what I mean, an organizer knowing what it means needing display attractions for his event and having done his research! And to answer the last question, one goal or dream was once that we could somehow be able to go to our father team in Italy, Umbrella Italian Division, to do a big combined event under conditions that Italy provided for something like that. We were invited, but unfortunately never managed to! As for Greece, a dream was to be able to have a vehicle with us at an event in Umbrella Corp’s colors. The Italians have two Humvee Hammers, a tank and a helicopter, while here we couldn’t even fit to have a table and bench in Athens, so you will tell me what is it that I’m asking for now hahaha.
GameAthlon 2013 – Photo by Umbrella Greek Division
15) Is there any important or funny experience you experienced as a team during your time in the Reenactment scene that you will never forget? What has Reenactment offered you?
Yes, they were among the examples I mentioned above of the scenes with the excessive immersion of the public! Our random encounters with the Greek police, the random grandpa who though we were far-right fanatics, and all those crazy stuff that we ended up doing in the middle of the street or at the events’ venues. Starting from when one of our members tried to stop a taxi in the middle of the street by displaying his riot shield, to girls’ screams because of a zombie that scared them and then we had to stop the legal, honest and earned coffee and cigarette break to go to pick it up, because it wasn’t staying put hahaha!
Comicdom Con Athens 2013 – Photo by Cassiel Cosplay Photography
16) What is the first thing you would say to someone who wants to get into Reenactment, either seriously or not? Do you think it’s easy to get started?
Unfortunately, reenactment is to some extent an expensive hobby, and like all hobbies, it requires sacrifices and expenses, if you believe it’s something for you. And if it doesn’t cost money, it certainly costs excessive time and material crafting artistry. You compare things and make your choice. Someone who really wants to get into it should, above all, choose the era and the character they want to represent, and devote a lot of time researching about them. After all, a very important part of reenactment is historical revival, you don’t always have to be a warrior. Many also choose ordinary citizens, everyday people. It’s another way to learn history, beyond what we were taught in school. I believe, from there on, everything is possible, if you like what you do. It becomes addictive afterwards and guides you by itself to become better. The difficult part is to find others like you who are already doing the same, so that you can participate. Even now it’s quite difficult and any efforts that have been made and are being made are unfortunately below average many times. I don’t want to upset anyone, it’s the environment that’s not suitable for this. You’ll usually see some displays at modeling events without some element of immersion. It’s not just putting on a uniform so that people will see me. What reenactment is ( apart from a few cases of ancient Greek content which the far right dominates and which stigmatize any other effort, which is a pity ), the only serious effort being done so far, is from a pioneering Greek World War II team which revives Greek soldiers from the epic of the ’40s, where the guys have really done a great job and where most of them are handmade, because there is no industry for those specific costumes. An old Umbrella Greek Division member and friend, Spyros Papadopoulos, is part of it too! Besides that, you’ll see individual efforts in the airsoft scene, but also in the Greek LARP scene, with passionate people making amazing costumes. But unfortunately the historical revival part is missing, although without missing the feeling of roleplaying itself, wherever you are and in whatever setting you participate!
GameAthlon 2013 – Photo by SpirosK Photography
17) Is there anything last you would like to share with our readers?
I think this is probably the most difficult question I have to answer haha! I would like to say that during those 2 years that we ran the team, I hope those who saw us and remember us had a good time! Have beautiful memories. And I hope we even inspired a couple of them! Anyone who wants to get into it even a little can try airsoft, but also LARP, as an alternative hobby in the Greek scene, where he may obtain elements of reenactment through them, and above all to support Greek events and any efforts made, because together we go forward as a whole! Those who want to remember us again, our page is still open on Facebook ( but inactive ), as well as our Youtube channel, featuring all our journey, from events to photoshoots, but also sketches on stage! Thank you again for the opportunity to share our moments! I will close by saying a catchphrase related to our journey in the scene, thus greeting those who still remember us. We left as we came, with a bang, not with the whimper.
eGaming 2012 – Photo by CowboyTV
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