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Research on xenophobia in Europe has recently received much attention in various academic disciplines. The existing scholarly debate focuses more on older patterns of xenophobia emerging as forms of ‘non-violent discrimination and segregation’ but pays less attention to xenophobia as a violent practice per se. This study attempts to examine xenophobia in Greece by employing an event extraction technique: we track violent attacks by Greek citizens on any kind of ‘foreigners’ by analysing a vast amount of text data available from newspapers and news websites over a twenty-year period: 1996-2015. We explore specific manifestations of xenophobic attitudes – physical and verbal attacks – to identify the actors involved and the targets of these violent xenophobic acts. Our results conform with previous studies in the field, first by highlighting the violent anti-immigrant behaviour of two actors, the neo-Nazi Golden Dawn party (GD) and the police, and second by identifying the targets of xenophobic violence. Our contribution to the literature is twofold: a) an application of an innovative methodological tool – event extraction analysis – to the study of a significant social phenomenon; and b) a mapping of the actors and targets of xenophobia in Greek society over the last twenty years.