There’s street art and there’s random graffiti tagging with no real purpose other than to deface.
And while the former is enjoying thriving home in certain neighborhoods in Greece’s capital city of Athens, the Mayor of city has plans to eradicate the latter.
Athens Mayor Giorgos Kaminis announced a new initiative, funded by the private sector and undertaken by the Athens Municipality, will seek to clean almost 10,000 square meters of facades of public buildings, which the mayor called “architectural treasures of the city.”
The historic city center of Athens is plagued by illegal posters and unsightly graffiti tagging. No building is spared, including historic, centuries-old churches and landmark buildings designed by world-renown architects like Ernst Ziller.
The program is called “This is Athens- Polis” and has a goal to clean up the historic city center, which includes popular tourist areas like Syntagma, Monastiraki, Plaka and Psyrri, as well as residential areas in the city.
The funding is coming from companies, individuals and foundations, all committed to the cleaning up and preservation of the city center, including the Laskarides Foundation, the taxi ride sharing company Beat, Constantine M. Logothetis, Cosmote, Ionian Hotels and Lampsa Hellenic Hotels– who own and operate hotels in the city.
The program was initiated by the Athens Partnership, a non-profit organization which promotes public-private partnerships between the not-for-profit world with government and corporate entities.
Hopefully, this time the program will yield success and allow Europe’s oldest, continuously-inhabited city the opportunity to shine in front of the millions of tourists– and residents alike.
The same mayor launched a similar program in 2016, but never produced tangible results.
6 comments
Clean up Athens, get rid of the graffiti. It’s not Chicago or New York. It’s ATHENS!!!!
Sad to hear. I am returning to Greece after 40 years. I hope it can be cleaned up. Respect Athens.
Athens has the worse problem of any place I have been to. It is really disturbing and I don’t know what the answer is- clean it one day and it is tagged again the next.
How some people believe griffiti is beautiful? For me is ugly , tattoos are ok for me as they don’t put them on their necks and face , is body griffiti . Athens was better in early 50ths with bullet holes on the building. You have to be little old to see Athens after the communist war . Anyway clean my city , you wreck the economy leave Athens alone .
I live in Chicago and we don’t anything as near the kind of graffiti that Athens, Thessaloniki and other Greek cities have…It’s not attractive, it makes the city look ugly, dirty, cheap and unsafe. And since Greece depends on tourists for it’s economy they should really take a serous look at this problem and learn from other cities how to stop it before tourists stop visiting Athens all together and head straight for the islands…
Have always wanted to visit Athens and was looking forward to seeing it, I should have checked as I hate the cockroach effective habit of moronic kids who might as well be smearing ‘shit’ over their walls. Have just looked at Plaka where house holders have spent time, effort and costs to paint to make their house look nice and every where is mindless tags. It also makes me angry that some consider the so called ‘street art’ is a worthy art form such as Banksy – IT IS NOT !!. The decision to scrawl graffity be it drawn well or not on some else’s property is wrong and a crime and the western world allows it because we are not prepared to impose very harsh and severe punishments to act an deterrent. One being that any valued items belonging to these bastards be destroyed or defaced in front of them, prolonged and hard graft work schemes where they are made to clean the cities up, if living with their patents severe fines, exposed in public and to employers. an automatic expulsion if at college or university and I could think of many more. Of course none of this would ever be done because we live in a world where undisciplined mindless feral yobs need to be understood and their exuberant youthful energies need to be channel into something more positive such as providing them with designated walls to crap on. When you see Athens you are seeing the future of all western cities, just with the explosion of mindless tattoos and freak body cosmetic surgery. One day I expect we will see such graffiti even all over the Acropolis and no number of city directed schemes by any mayor will make the slightest of a difference. Shame I can’t cancel my trip as I know when I see it all for real it will depress and sadden me greatly.