athens-greece

Festivals and entertainment in Athens Greece

Athens has many forms of entertainment. About 20 big nightclubs with Greek music that host the biggest artists and thousands of people all year round is one of the areas. Another area that mainly hosts foreign music lovers is the clubs. There are many big clubs in Athens and they host the most famous parties by DJs from abroad and beyond. For lovers of Greek music with live music there are many music stages, folk music, bars and many Greek restaurants which make the difference in your going out at a much lower cost.

The vibrancy, fun and joy that engulfs the night life of Athens is well known and of course it is not limited only to weekends but the intense action takes place on weekdays as well!

In the alternative neighborhood of our apartments in Psirri, in the square of Agia Irini, Thisio, Plaka as well as in the impressive Gazi shopping center, Kolonaki, etc. you will meet and have fun in the most popular shops of the city.

The Syntagma tram takes you directly to the exquisite beach bar-café-restaurants of Glyfada and the Athens Riviers! And the unique music tracks for a more glamorous mood open their doors albeit late, after 11 at night, but they will certainly keep you awake until the early hours of the morning!

The cafeteria is the main meeting place not only in Athens but all over Greece. But is not all about coffee, Athens has a lot to offer for entertainment, numerous Theatres and Cinemas are spread in most areas of Athens.

Before the invasion of the television in Greece the movies and theatres as well as the shadow theatre of Kargiozis for the family with children was the main night outing for the Athenians.
During this time there was over 200 cinemas in Athens and Piraeus not to mention the Theatres in Panepistimiou street and Omonia square where was located the famous theatre of Kotopouli.

But a few years ago the fashion of the movies came back and many new cinema complexes like the Village Cinemas growing like mushrooms in many areas of Athens especially in huge shopping malls like the Allou Park in Petrou Ralli street (Agios Ioannis Rentis), in Marousi and elsewhere.

The example of Allou Park ( a large entertainment park at Nikaia) had followed many other areas in Athens. In such shopping centres you will find all kind of international chain department shops. plus fun fairs, cinemas, cafes and restaurants. Fun Fairs there are also in other areas of Athens like in Alimos near the old Airport.

For families with children a good idea is a visit to Attica Zoo witch hosts many species of animals from Europe, Africa and Asia. The Olympic games in Athens had as a result the creation of many sport centres. Any kind of sport activity can be found mostly in the Athens Riviera, golf, bowling, water sports. The Athens horse racing has been moved to Markopoulo near the Airport of Athens. For the fans of lucky games on the mount Parnitha is the Casino Mon Parnes.

Most famous though Athens is for its famous nightlife. Greeks unlike most west Europeans are late birds. they will never go to a restaurant earlier as 9 or ten in the night. If they go so late to a restaurants or a tavern you can imagine what time they will go to floor shows, night clubs, and live music halls. Many night clubs in Athens open after midnight.

In Friday and Saturday night whole areas like Kolonaki live a real traffic jam between 3- 5 in the morning. But not only in Kolonaki almost in every Athenian suburb main square Friday and Saturday night the music bars and cafeterias are buzzing with young people until the early morning hours.

Even if its rain or snow you will see many of them outside the bars sitting on the bar outdoors stools. Athens is buzzing of nightlife mostly in the winter because in the Summer the buzzing and the Parties of most of the Athenians will travel to the Greek Party islands like Mykonos or Santorini. Our suggestion is to visit Athens once more in the winter so you can enjoy the city more close with its inhabitants.

Festivals and Activities 2022

Niarchos Foundation Cultural Center

stauros_niarxos_foundationThe Stavros Niarchos Foundation Cultural Center welcomes the Summer at the Dome and, in collaboration with ARTWORKS, transforms it into a welcoming new meeting place for the public, with original architectural design and works of contemporary art that deal with the importance of myth in the present.

The exhibition MYTHOLOGIES and NEW PLACES at the SNFCC Dome includes sculptures, installations and an augmented reality application and explores our long and complex relationship with mythology and the role it plays in our lived reality and the limits of our imagination. 13 works of contemporary art confront the scale of the Dome; in a different cosmogony, mythical figures appear that refer to the underground, the excavation past, the technological-digital sphere and science fiction. Eleni Papanastasiou curates the space architecturally by creating a seating system. Their arrangement is free, so that the movement between them and the sculptures is not hierarchical or guided, favoring the feeling that the body is in the center of a sphere.

LEVEL 69″ LIVE STUDIO

Event venue · Party and entertainment services · Night club for dancing
A quality and tasteful venue in Moschato, specially designed for LIVE SHOWS.
A music stage with perfect sound and lighting effects that transform every concert into a real experience for both the artists and the audience.

“LEVEL 69” LIVE STUDIO hosts bands that cover a wide range of Greek and foreign music. New and old groups enjoy together with the audience the excellent effect of the dynamic acoustics of the LIVE STUDIO “LEVEL 69”.
Comfortable and functional room with air conditioning and ventilation creates the right entertainment environment
Enjoy the drink of your choice from the welcoming bar with live music or music selections by the DJ

Four contemporary artists (Theodoros Giannakis, Petros Moris, Panos Profitis, Valinia Svoronou), exhibit works with direct mythological references that give new interpretations of archetypes. They attempt to reveal the mechanisms by which beliefs that are now taken for granted are constructed and consolidated. At the same time, with their works, they examine the function of myth, its relationship with the categories “nature” and “culture” and its use in the narrative of current affairs, while recalling its often subversive dynamics. Creators observe the changing condition of myth and propose unexpected, playful and productive ways of challenging dominant narratives; they appropriate and rewrite the body of myth, tracing new morphological paths in new places.

Live at Level 69 in Athens

Athens Festival

“Ghostly and magical, emotional and personal, the performance of Yiannis Houvardas proved to be the best start for the Athens Festival”, we wrote about “The Other Side of the Storm”, which opened the program of Piraeus 260 on the first day of June. With the completion his, eight weeks later, the sentiment has shifted from excitement to concern. Recognizing that this is not a phenomenon this year and clearly taking into account the factor of the pandemic, which the theater received, it is nevertheless not unfounded to say that the Festival has not succeeded in defining the summer cultural identity of the capital. Athens does not live to its rhythms, as it happens in corresponding festivals in Europe, e.g., Avignon or Edinburgh. Of course, we have seen great performances (thanks) in it; but the comment is about the fact that the Festival seems to be aimed at a specific, rather limited audience, while it has not become a magnet for foreign visitors or – except in a few cases – a space that gives birth to proposals, trends, faces; it seems to follow rather than precede.

Sound and Light, hopefully will start again

The “Agora Athens” project was at the center of the meeting held by the vice-president of the Athens Chamber of Commerce and chamber responsible for the project, Nikos Koyoumtsis, with the president of the Hellenic Tourism Organization (GNTO), Angela Gerekou.

As stated in a post on the chamber’s website, the project is implemented by the EEA with the support of the Development and Tourism Promotion Company of the Municipality of Athens (EATA) and aspires to transform the city’s historic market into an “open trade center”, increasing shopping traffic in the Plaka – Monastiraki region, boosting tourism and strengthening local employment.

This is the second meeting with Mrs. Gerekou for the project in question, while it was decided to systematize the communication between the two sides, with weekly teleconferences between partners of the chamber and the GNTO.

“Sound and Light” is one of the most beautiful spectacles of the summer, which you can enjoy on the outskirts of the Acropolis. There, between colors and beloved voices, your senses are filled with history and your mind creates its own shows. Besides, it didn’t take much for the imagination to “work”. The environment itself was what rested gently on your eyes, thousands of years of history carved into every stone.

But seeing the monuments bathed only in white light, perhaps we could bring history more alive by bringing back the institution of “Sound and Light”. And why not apply it to other monuments to create incentives for the nocturnal summer “life” of the dozens of archaeological sites that exist in the Greek territory.

Thus, the tourist should wander at night the magical landscape of Athens, Olympia, Delphi, Zeus, Dodona, Epidaurus, through a fairy-tale landscape, to feel and listen with his eyes and heart to the tradition and history of each archaeological site that would come alive under the light of the stars.

I have in mind The Sound and Light of Rhodes that I watched as a child, enchanted by the voice of the great Manos Katrakis in Greek and Peter Ustinov in English, (really what happened to Sound and Light in Rhodes?) or the night walks organized in European cities, attracting thousands of tourists looking for more than a cold few minutes of stylized sightseeing during a day visit.

Who could resist a magical night walk where Socrates taught, where Pericles preached his epitaph teaching us Democracy, where the seed of the Christian message was “dropped on the stone” by the apostle Paul?