This Parrot-Friendly Athens Neighborhood Keeps Showing Up In The New York Times
You don't need green feathers and a beak to chirp about Pagrati, but it helps.
Right before the covid pandemic I wrote about a semi-unknown Athenian neighborhood for a Greek newspaper that partners with The New York Times. It’s called Pagrati, sometimes spelled as Pangrati, and is both not beautiful and is home to no major tourist sights besides the Panathenaic Stadium, called locally Kallimarmaro in reference to its beautiful marble composition.
Like most legacy publications that strive for relevance (thirst for ad revenue might have something to do with that), The New York Times is always quick to tout the next “up and coming” “buzzy” “formerly industrial” neighborhood of any given European/Asian/South American (there are no up and coming North American neighborhoods left, apparently) city, thus conferring the imprimatur of establishment on it and triggering the process of inexorably squeezing out whatever soul actually made it “buzzy” to begin with.
The zombies of Eighth Avenue (where the newspaper has its headquarters) haven’t actually deemed Pagrati buzzy, which it is, but they might have called it hipster, which it isn’t — there are other Athenian districts for that. Doubtless having read and laminated my previous paean to Pagrati, the editors of the Times decided first to go for the real estate angle, so there was that. A story which garnered a good bit of attention in Athens, because good apartments are getting harder and harder to find, in part because of foreign investments and the grabby claws of Airbnb.
Call it an act of self-fulfilling prophecy, but fast forward to the latest Times story about Europe’s golden visa schemes losing their luster — with Pagrati featuring prominently in the photos the newspaper used in that piece. One caption reads “The Pangrati neighborhood of Athens is a popular area for investors through Greece’s program.”
What the article doesn’t say is that the neighborhood of Koukaki, closer to the Acropolis, is at this point saturated with Airbnbs. There, as in the center of Dubrovnik and other semi-Disnified European cities, it is now impossible to have a quiet conversation on the sidewalk because of the noise made by the trolley suitcases as tourists drag them over the cobblestones.
Flying high above this cacophony are the green parrots of Pagrati, who famously make their forever home in the National Garden but flit about Pagrati’s busy streets and smaller parks by day.
For the moment Pagrati is still largely untrammeled by tourists because, as noted above, there is not much to see here. The neighborhood is resolutely middle class, fairly young, and very Greek. Locals seem to like it that way.
As the Athens metro expands across the area, look for some of that local flavor to change. But give it a couple more years — which is about how long it takes, incidentally, to find a parking spot in Pagrati.
Oh, to be a feathered Athenian, looking down at it all — New York Times-toting “foreign investors” and noisy next-coolest-place hunters included.