Athens street art map: a walk from Exarchia to Metaxourgeio

The route planner above shows every stop in walking order. Untick any stop you want to skip and the planner redraws the route and recalculates distance and time. The stops fall into neighbourhood groups (Exarchia, Omonia, Psyrri, Kerameikos and Gazi, Metaxourgeio), so on a hot day you can drop a whole group and the rest still hangs together.

Street art in Athens changes from week to week: pieces are painted over, tagged or bleached by the sun. This route leans on what lasts (sculpture, a gallery, an ancient site, a long-lived festival mural and the streets where new work keeps appearing), so treat any single painting as a bonus.

The route

The walk crosses the centre from east to west, then turns north. It begins in Exarchia, where walls work as the neighbourhood's noticeboard, and follows Patision Street down to Omonia. Athinas Street brings you past City Hall, with a detour onto Aiolou, before you slip west into Psyrri, the quarter with the most photographed walls in the city.

From Psyrri, Ermou Street leads to the ancient cemetery at Kerameikos and the old gasworks at Gazi. The last leg heads north into Metaxourgeio, quieter and emptier, where the city's gallery and its best-known owl sit a few blocks apart. Why the walls look the way they do is the subject of my essay on Athens walls and empty buildings.

The stops

Navarinou Park

In 2009 residents occupied a car park on Navarinou Street that was due to be developed and turned it into a garden, run by open assemblies ever since. Its walls carry murals and slogans repainted as causes change: here paint is speech before it is decoration. I wrote about the park in a piece on artistic activism and the city. It is a neighbourhood space, not an attraction, so walk through quietly and photograph walls, not people.

Athens Polytechnic

The nineteenth-century campus on Patision Street is where the student uprising of November 1973 ended, when an army tank broke through the main gate. Every 17 November a march sets off from here. The walls on Stournari and Tositsa streets have carried slogans, stencils and large painted figures for decades, cleaned and covered again in cycles, so look at the layers rather than any single piece. Around the anniversary the area is crowded and the campus may be closed.

Five Circles, Omonia Square

Walk down Patision to Omonia, where George Zongolopoulos's Five Circles rises about 15 metres: a cross-shaped steel frame carrying five rings moved by water. First shown at the Venice Biennale in 2001 and installed here afterwards, it worked only briefly before a long restoration, and with support from the Onassis Foundation it was running again in 2020. Zongolopoulos also made the Umbrellas on Thessaloniki's seafront. Keep bags closed in the crowds here.

Theseus, Kotzia Square

A few minutes down Athinas Street, Kotzia Square opens in front of Athens City Hall. In the middle stands Theseus, a fountain sculpture by Sophia Vari built from swelling curves cut by straight edges. The city invited Vari to show monumental work here in 2000, and this piece stayed. When a much larger statue was later proposed for the spot, she argued that Theseus was made for the scale of this square. Stand back and judge. A marble Pericles from 1971 stands at City Hall.

Beneficial and Xenios Hermes

Cut across to the corner of Aiolou and Vyssis streets for a brass Hermes from 1993 by Alekos Fassianos, a painter better known for his canvases. The title calls the god both the giver of profit and the friend of strangers, which suits a street of shops. It takes a minute to see and reminds you that public art in Athens is not all on walls. On weekday mornings Aiolou is busy with deliveries; on Sundays it is nearly empty.

Iroon Square

A few minutes west, Iroon Square is the small heart of Psyrri, once a quarter of workshops and now mostly tavernas, bars and hotels. The lanes around it hold the densest painting on the walk: tall portraits, cartoon characters, paste-ups and painted roller shutters. Much of it is commissioned by the businesses whose walls it covers, so it is polished, and it changes when a bar changes hands. Come before late morning, while the painted shutters are still down.

Sarri Street

Sarri Street runs along the western side of Psyrri and is one of the streets most often named for its walls. Look for large faces and figures on the low older buildings, and for smaller work at eye level on doors and electricity boxes. Some walls have been painted so often that older pieces show through the newer layers. If a building is boarded up, enjoy it from the pavement: empty houses here have rotten floors, and many still belong to someone.

Kerameikos archaeological site

Walk down to Ermou Street and turn west. The ancient potters' quarter gave English the word ceramic, and its cemetery lined the start of the Sacred Way to Eleusis. The fenced site is a green hollow below street level, with tombs, the remains of the Dipylon Gate and a museum of funerary sculpture. Those grave markers were carved to be seen by people passing on the road, which makes them the oldest public art on this route. The site is ticketed, so check opening hours before you go.

Technopolis and the Peace Globe

A few minutes further west, the gasworks founded in 1857 have been Technopolis, a municipal cultural venue, since 1999. The chimneys and industrial halls were kept, and the grounds hold exhibitions, concerts and a small museum devoted to Maria Callas. Look for the Peace Globe (2000) by Nikos-Giorgos Papoutsidis, five wreaths of bronze olive branches standing for the five continents. Access depends on what is on, so check before you go.

Municipal Gallery of Athens

Walk north into Metaxourgeio. On Avdi Square the Municipal Gallery has, since 2010, occupied a restored nineteenth-century building linked to the silk works that gave the district its name. The collection runs to about 3,000 works by Greek artists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, shown in changing displays; check opening hours before you go. Around the square, low houses with peeling lime plaster have drawn painters for years, so take the side streets slowly.

Knowledge Speaks, Wisdom Listens

Finish a few blocks north, at the corner of Samou and Konstantinou Palaiologou streets. WD (Wild Drawing), an artist from Bali who works in Athens, painted this owl in 2016 for Petit Paris d'Athènes, a neighbourhood festival backed by the City of Athens. The owl was Athena's bird, stamped on ancient Athenian coins. The painting is anamorphic: from the right spot across the junction, the bird seems to lift off the wall, so move around until it clicks. Metaxourgeio station is a few minutes back south.

Practical notes

Start early. Morning light is kinder to colour, the streets are emptier, and Sunday morning is best of all. In summer the middle of the day is very hot and shade is scarce between Omonia and Gazi, so carry water and save the gallery or the Kerameikos museum for the hottest hours. Opening hours at Kerameikos, Technopolis and the gallery change with the season and with events.

These are residential streets. Photograph walls rather than residents, and stay out of empty buildings. Add nothing of your own: there is no free wall on this route, and the people scrubbing tags are often the owners. Around 17 November and 6 December, anniversaries marked by marches in Exarchia, check the news and skip the first two stops if the mood is tense. Marble pavements turn slippery after rain, so wear shoes with grip.

Further reading

A guidebook for the rest of the city, a world survey of the scene, and a drawing manual for anyone who would rather sketch the walls than photograph them. More routes and tools are in the Atlas.

These picks come from publisher details and published reviews rather than our own testing.

Questions

How long does the Athens street art walk take?

The planner shows distance and time for the stops you keep. As a rough guide, allow two to four hours with stops, more with the museums.

Is it safe to walk through Exarchia and Omonia?

In daylight both are busy with students, shoppers and commuters, and the route keeps to main streets and squares. Watch your bag in crowds and on the metro, as in any big city. If you meet a demonstration or a police cordon, walk around it and rejoin the route at Omonia.

Can I paint or put up stickers along the route?

No. None of these walls is a free wall, many belong to people already paying to clean them, and painting someone else's wall without permission is against the law in Greece. If you want to paint, look for a workshop or festival that has an owner's consent for a wall.

Are the murals on this map permanent?

None of them is guaranteed. The sculpture, the gallery and the ancient site will be there; the painted walls depend on owners, weather and other painters. The owl in Metaxourgeio has lasted since 2016, but if a stop has changed when you arrive, look at what replaced it, because that is how these walls work.