The Greek capital is still home to an impressive number of old cinemas – beloved silver screens that have survived for up to a century.
ATHENS
The redevelopment of Vasilissis Olgas Avenue with its pedestrianization project will be completed in 12 months, according to Athens Mayor Kostas Bakoyannis.
An art lovers paradise, the downtown Athens neighborhood of Pangrati is home to the National Gallery and the wonderful Basil & Elise Goulandris Foundation.
Upgrading the dense, occasionally appalling, urban fabric of Athens with its mazes of gray, multistory concrete blocks and bare party walls standing even next to world-famous archaeological sites, is no doubt a daunting task – albeit one that is exigently called for.
The year 1896, following the first modern Olympic Games, was defined by a widespread sense of optimism in Athens, a rather insignificant city of just 130,000.
Mayors from 44 Balkan cities have arrived in Athens to attend the second gathering of the B40 Balkan Cities Network on Monday and Tuesday.
The city of Athens will welcome mayors from 66 cities and 10 countries in the Balkans on January 22-24, in the context of the B40 Balkan Cities Network Conference. Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu will hand over the presidency of the B40 Balkan Cities Network to his Athens counterpart, Kostas Bakoyannis.
Passenger traffic this year at the Athens airport, which last year handled 22.7 million travelers, is expected to exceed the performance of 2019. That figure was up significantly, by 98.3%, compared to 2021, but still was 11.1% short of 2019.dele
Major projects worth more than 3 billion euros – without taking into account the indirect fiscal benefit of major interventions – have been launched or are on the starting line for 2023 in Attica.
Athens Municipality foresees revenues of over 1 billion euros (up from 917.6 in 2022), an increase of investments by 153% compared to 2019 and funding form European and national resources worth 510 million euros in 2023, according to the city’s 2023 budget agreed on Monday.
Despite the importance of open spaces in the Greek urban landscape, the issue is considered “secondary” by the central state.
The Panepistimiou Street metro station in central Athens will be closed on Tuesday from 9 a.m. by order of the Hellenic Police as they are expecting mass gatherings to mark 14 years since the fatal shooting of teenager Alexis Grigoropoulos.
Athens’ future as an attractive and sustainable city will depend, no doubt, on a variety of factors – some constant, some impossible to predict. One of its biggest challenges, however, lies in attracting new residents back into its most central neighborhoods; the sailing appears to be anything but smooth, and obstacles – big and small – abound.
With image being dominant, everything is visible as long as it remains in the spotlight. It is then withdrawn, for other things to take its place.
The downtown Athens house where Maria Callas spent her youth, from 1937 to 1945, will be restored and turned into an opera academy dedicated to the legendary Greek soprano.
The first thing that Eric Adams, a former police officer and state senator and the current mayor of New York, noticed when he entered Athens City Hall on Thursday, was an enormous screen on one of the walls, featuring numbers corresponding to the real-time progression of various citizens’ requests across Athens.
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