The Journal
Athens, in long form.
Editorial reads on architecture, culture, food, and the considered life in Athens and the Athenian Riviera.
Culture
Four Eyes in the Sky
Greece has burned enough times to look up. Four satellites are now watching for the next fire — and the engineers running the system work two streets from Syntagma.
7 min read
Culture
The City That Sounds Like This Now
Athens has become the opening night for world tours. Here's why the biggest bands keep choosing it first.
4 min read
Culture
The Woman Cooling the City
Athens created a job that didn't exist anywhere in the world and hired an anthropologist to do it. The brief: stop the city from cooking itself.
5 min read
Architecture
The Polykatoikia Moment
The concrete apartment block that embarrassed Athens for half a century is now its most interesting design brief.
6 min read
Culture
The Years Greece Woke Up
Seferis won the Nobel. Theodorakis was banned. Mercouri was at Cannes. Greece in the 1960s discovered it was extraordinary — and then the Colonels arrived to remind it who was in charge.
8 min read
Stay.
The hotels behind the stories.
Culture
After Midnight
Athens doesn't begin until midnight. What happens between then and dawn is the city's real social life — and it runs on rules no one wrote down.
6 min read
Culture
Athens Doesn't Pretend
The first thing you see landing in Athens is a sea of concrete apartment blocks covered in graffiti. That's not the city failing to be beautiful. That's the city telling you what it is.
6 min read
Architecture
Dig Anywhere. Find Everything.
Athens is trying to build a metro. The problem is Athens keeps finding itself in the way.
4 min read
Culture
What Elliniko Is Costing
The largest urban development in European history is being built on Athens' coastline. The city is only now beginning to understand the terms.
7 min read
Food
The Greek Pantry
Greece has one of the great food cultures on earth. For forty years it served tourists moussaka. That is now ending.
7 min read
Eat.
The restaurants behind the writing.
Culture
The Man Who Made Athens Necessary
Henry Miller came to Greece for two weeks in 1939. He stayed four months. The book he wrote about it he called the best thing he'd ever done.
5 min read
Culture
The Ones Who Stayed
Roughly 500,000 Greeks left between 2010 and 2018. Some didn't. This is what staying cost them — and what they built with the room the crisis left behind.
8 min read
Culture
The Ones Who Left
They built careers in London, Frankfurt, Amsterdam. Athens is the city they talk about at dinner — and the one some are starting to reconsider.
7 min read
Athens
