It has been the hangout of writers, artists, poets and politicians, doctors and lawyers, radicals and revolutionaries for as long as anyone can remember. And for 44 years, Christos Vanas, the proprietor of Mouria, has let them all in. Every day at 7am, the taciturn former waiter has been the first man to step inside the historic cafe in Exarchia, the heart of leftwing Athens.
It is a ritual he has kept punctiliously, opening up the famous gathering place before he himself has had his first coffee. After a send-off expected to last into the small hours, the cafe’s large, iron-framed doors will shut forever on Sunday when patrons walk out of the mosaic-floored institution. It will be the closing act in a drama that began with the expiry of the premises’ lease last summer.
Stelios Goutis, 83, is an actor who trod the boards for more than six decades before his fame broadened playing Papa Triantafyllos, a priest with a penchant for a tipple or two in the TV series Hara’s Cafe. He waxes lyrical about“the calming effect” of traditional eateries that have had such an outsized role in the lives of Greeks. You down a tsipouro or two, you meet friends you may or may not have arranged to meet, and all the pressures of daily life slip away.
It’s a form of psychotherapy. When it goes, we’ll look back at it as a memory of good times even if it is a loss, too.” Both men were among the 7,500 signatories of an online campaign that urged the Greek culture ministry to have the cafe declared a protected heritage site when the building’s owners announced they would not be renewing its tenancy in an area fast undergoing gentrification. The culture ministry failed to intervene.
Few districts in downtown Athens are more redolent of resistance, leftwing solidarity, radicalism and anarchist foment than Exarchia. Its spirit of anti-authoritarianism dates back to the uprising at the nearby Athens Polytechnic, an event that led to the death of dozens of students but is credited with the collapse of rightwing military rule in 1974, barely 35 years after the nation’s bitter civil war. But with tourist numbers in the Greek capital more than doubling over the last decade, the neighbourhood of narrow, graffiti-daubed streets has also been discovered by investors, catering to the tastes and needs of foreign visitors.
It’s about nostalgia and we’ll leave with our heads held high.” For Greeks raised in Exarchia, it was an unnerving experience to walk streets that were no longer recognisable, she lamented. Everywhere you look there are new shops with signs in English and buildings turned into suites and short-term rentals. You could be anywhere.” For many, the last straw had come when travel platforms began advertising tours of the hangouts in Exarchia patronised by hardened leftists.
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