Government
Protecting the Street Art of Athens
The Street Art Conservators battle time and the elements in an effort to preserve the Greek capital’s world-class cache of graffiti.
Greece and graffiti go way back: The world’s earliest surviving graffito may in fact be an ancient Greek advertisement for a brothel. More contemporary Greek taggers expressed their political beliefs during World War II and the country’s ensuing civil war and military dictatorship of the late 1960s and early 1970s.
In the 1990s, a wave of elaborate public street art—an extension of graffiti that’s often more figurative than (and sometimes in tension with) its progenitor—spread throughout Athens. Today, with much of its surfaces coated in images that often comment on the country’s economic crisis, Athens has been hailed as a “mecca” for street art in Europe.