Psiri Athens: Arts District and Athens Nightlife

Psiri is Athens's arts and nightlife district — a neighbourhood adjacent to Monastiraki whose warehouses, workshops and 19th-century buildings house the restaurants, bars, galleries and music venues that have made it the centre of Athens's contemporary creative culture since the 1990s. The neighbourhood's transformation from a working crafts district — its trades included metalworking, leather goods and the printing presses that produced Greece's newspapers — to an entertainment and arts destination followed the template of urban creative districts elsewhere in Europe while retaining a Greek character in the exuberant sociability of its outdoor tables, the quality of its meze culture and the combination of traditional rebetika music and contemporary electronic sound that coexist in different venues on the same street.

The Plateia Iroon (Heroes' Square) at the heart of Psiri is the neighbourhood's social centre — a square of outdoor café and bar tables that fills completely on warm evenings as Athenians gather for the extended pre-dinner drinking ritual of ouzo, tsipouro and mezedes that is one of the great pleasures of Greek social life. The square's atmosphere — casual, loud, multi-generational and entirely at ease with itself — represents the best of what Athens's public social culture can offer and stands as evidence that the city's economic difficulties have not extinguished the particular genius for collective enjoyment that defines Greek urban culture. The neighbourhood's tavernas serve the traditional meze repertoire of grilled octopus, tzatziki, saganaki, spanakopita and the lamb and pork dishes of the Athenian grill tradition at prices that remain remarkably reasonable for a European capital.

The street art culture of Psiri and the adjacent Kerameikos neighbourhood constitutes one of the finest open-air galleries in Europe — a continuously evolving collection of murals, paste-ups and spray-painted works by Greek and international artists that covers the neighbourhood's building facades with images that respond directly to the political and social conditions of contemporary Greece. The economic crisis of the 2010s, the refugee crisis and the tensions of European Union membership have all found expression in the neighbourhood's walls, making Psiri's street art a kind of running political commentary on Greek public life as well as a genuine contribution to the international street art tradition that began in New York and has found one of its most politically engaged homes in Athens.