This chapter examines monuments associated with a tentative “history of the Left” as represented in the public spaces of Athens. Dispersed throughout the city, these monuments commemorate individuals who were tortured or killed by state forces or parastatal actors from the mid-1940s onward, referencing events of profound significance in the trajectory of modern Greece. In some instances, the events underpinning theses monuments have been assimilated into hegemonic narratives, leading to the installation of institutionally sanctioned monuments. In other cases, however, the events exceed the integrative capacity of the dominant ideology and are thus suppressed within official histories. These “undesirable” events are often appropriated by political parties of the Left or grassroots collectives seeking to mobilise the past within the context of contemporary social struggles. Drawing on Walter Benjamin’s perspective on the dialectical interdependence between the past and the present, as well as the contingent nature of history, this chapter traces how these dynamics define aspects of the public sphere in Athens. It also questions whether some of these monuments signal the emergence of a counter-public sphere. By highlighting the connection of these artefacts to unresolved social contradictions, the analysis challenges the linear narrative of national history, resisting the confinement of the monuments’ meanings exclusively to the past.