DIMITRIS RIGOPOULOS

Ethereal trees that defy conventional form on Aegina

If there is one thing Anastasis Ioannou remembers from his childhood, it’s his father stuck among his easels of oils and watercolors, wielding a paintbrush or pencil.

Adapting to a new fire-prone reality

Valentini Papaioannou did not know what to expect as she returned to her home in Palaia Penteli, northeast of Athens, on the afternoon of Tuesday, August 13. Everything had happened so fast when she’d left it 30 hours earlier with her husband and their 2-year-old son, running away from a wildfire […]

18.08.2024 / 09:02

Northern Attica in constant ring of fire

The hitherto “privileged” parts of northern Attica have become a red zone for natural disasters. Despite their vulnerability, most peri-urban settlements that have developed near forests lack local fire protection action plans.

16.08.2024 / 18:07

A generation is watching the Attica it knew disappear

One of my favorite pastimes is to photograph the countryside, forests and greenery near the city in the phase of regeneration following a large blaze.

14.08.2024 / 12:00

A ‘self-managed commune’ next to police headquarters

For thousands of drivers and pedestrians traveling daily on Alexandras Avenue near the Panathinaikos soccer stadium, the view of the refugee apartment blocks has remained largely unchanged for at least 40 years: faded ocher facades, rickety balconies, peeling walls, tattered curtains, scattered satellite dishes and political and soccer slogans. Few notice the four black, neatly arranged banners on the only apartment building (out of eight) facing the avenue.

06.08.2024 / 17:32

Athens 2004: The miracle and the trauma

Greece’s bid to host the 1996 Olympics on the centenary of the modern Games in Athens seemed so ludicrous, it even featured in the verses of a song written by Lina Nikolakopoulou and performed by Haris Alexiou, poking fun at the audacity of such an ambitious undertaking by a country still struggling to join modernity. It was regarded as a “national wager” and we ended up losing it to Atlanta.

20.07.2024 / 16:58

Athens’ tourism miracle getting warped in the heat

A veteran hotelier in Athens used to say, “Tourism is like a storm; for three years you might ride high on the waves and for the next two, you struggle to keep your head above water.”

08.07.2024 / 14:39

Scrubland fires becoming Attica’s new nightmare

While low vegetation was once seen as a blessing as it could delay the spread of a fire, this is no longer the case, as the recent blazes in Attica and on Serifos showed.

01.07.2024 / 21:38

The binary legacy of the Acropolis Museum

June 20, 2009 seems like a good starting point to be searching for the “ground zero” of the tourism boom in the central Athens neighborhood of Koukaki. But is it the only one?

19.06.2024 / 11:43

‘I believe we got it right the first time’

For many years, French-Swiss architect Bernard Tschumi was an almost unwanted person in Greece, at least for those who knew his name and associated him with the first and most emblematic public building constructed in Athens in the 21st century.

15.04.2024 / 13:29

New anxieties grip Greeks in 2024

Tapping into the values and beliefs permeating Greek society, a survey by the Dianeosis think-tank shows that the return of economic insecurity, the consequences of climate change and the demographic issue are seen as major threats to the country’s future.

12.04.2024 / 11:31

Is national kitsch not so bad after all?

When Tina Kyriaki saw Marina Satti’s video for Greece’s entry for the Eurovision Song Contest for the first time, it made her mad. Very mad, in fact. “My first thought was that we were gouging out our own eyes,” the founder of Alternative Athens tells Kathimerini, quoting a Greek proverb.

11.03.2024 / 21:47

Athenian reflections of a Harvard dean

It was Sarah Whiting’s last morning in Athens. For the final day of this dense, week-long tour of Greece, the weather improved and the winter sun shone over Syntagma Square. From her hotel balcony she enjoyed a typical sunny Athenian panorama, with the silhouette of the Parthenon in the background. Until […]

05.03.2024 / 10:57

Metapolitefsi divides generations

The remarkable (if not yawning) chasm between the generation that experienced the entire cycle of Greece’s return to democracy and younger age groups born into the cycle of the so-called Metapolitefsi has been vividly illustrated by a poll commissioned by Kathimerini.

22.01.2024 / 22:03

No breaks on the path of radical reform

It took him just nine months in office in his first-ever term in government to score his first big win as head of the ministry responsible for bringing Greek bureaucracy into the digital age.