Maria Mavrogianni was curled up in a fetal position on the ground, waiting for the music to begin. Cars passed through Pangrati in central Athens, trying to catch a glimpse of the spectacle that had drawn the eager crowd to gather outside the neighborhood’s Holy Church of Saint Spyridon on a recent Tuesday evening.
To her surprise, Mavrogianni had been asked to do this performance by the Municipality of Athens as a part of the Summer in Athens 2025 festival. The month-long program, which began on June 21st and ends on July 20th, involves over 57 events at more than 41 cultural venues around the city, all free to the public. The mayor of Athens, Haris Doukas, described the festival in a recent article from iefimerida as “proof that culture can be everywhere, addressed to everyone and even without a ticket.”
Having the opportunity to dance at festivals like this means a lot to Mavrogianni, who grew up dancing on the island of Crete. Though she now lives in Paris, where she has dedicated her life to performing and developing her craft, she doesn’t like to describe herself as a professional dancer.
“When it comes to art, it is not the payment that makes it professional,” she said. The primary reason that she chooses to dance, especially in Greece, is because she sees it as “a way of giving back to her country.” When performing, she hopes to “inspire people to appreciate the art of hip-hop” and “get more involved in dance,” overall.
For over ten years, Mavrogianni specialized solely in classical ballet and contemporary. Now, at 22 years old, she describes her current style as “contemporary hip-hop freestyle.” This fusion occurred after she left home to study chemistry in Thessaloniki. This is where she witnessed and participated in her first hip-hop battle, an event where groups and individual dancers compete to improvise the best freestyle combinations.
The fast pace of the battles was “really hard in the beginning” for Mavrogianni because she was “losing everything” as soon as her performance would start. In spite of this, she kept coming back every week, which she believes has made her a stronger person and dancer.
In Greece, “Athens is the best place to be if you want to dance,” Mavrogianni said. “Thessaloniki for hip-hop.” There, she has found the street-style community to be much more supportive compared to the competitive and unfriendly battle scenes she has encountered in Paris. Since the community is smaller in Thessaloniki, she says dancers “don’t have a lot of influence, but it’s easy to grow because people are hugging you in a way.”
In addition to participating in festivals, Mavrogianni encourages others to join this unique community by leading workshops for people in Greece to learn about and explore hip-hop styles. She also helps run and organize community hip-hop jams with her friends in Thessaloniki.
Every time she dances, Mavrogianni says she evolves. She had done the solo she was set to perform at the Summer in Athens festival hundreds of times, but its current form is completely different from the first version she had created for a university assignment in November of 2024. “It’s really about what I have inside of me during a specific period of time,” she said. “It’s never the same.”
She wore a calf-length dress with green and yellow flowers which made her light pink hair stand out. Mavrogianni only had herself and a small white stool to appease the festival audience—no one, not even her, knew exactly what to expect. This freedom to grow is the beauty of the medium, and something she thinks Greece can benefit from.
A bulwark between the city and the mountain, The Volunteer Forest Protection and Firefighting Team of Ilioupoli is at the end of the road, literally on the frontline of climate change. As unprecedented heat and drought bring intensifying wildfires to Greece, the volunteers of Ilioupoli struggle to protect their forest under the command of a government that volunteers say doesn’t prioritize the preservation of unbuilt environments.
The Hellenic Fire Service, volunteer firefighter Maria Arva said, has three tiers of importance: human lives; then property; and finally nature. She agrees that human lives must be protected first, but gets frustrated when people build homes in fire-prone forests, and expect them to be prioritized over the nature that drew them there. For Arva, “You have to save lives. You have to save priority properties. But the forest is the most important for us.”
As wildfires intensify around the country, Greek fire response has focused on fire suppression rather than prevention. Faced with growing, harder to extinguish fires and the destruction of their land, some underfunded but dedicated volunteer firefighters like Arva have taken the work of wildfire prevention into their own hands.
The Greek branch of the World Wildlife Fund insists that a transition to fire prevention is essential. “We need to do things and activities in the forest to prepare them for summer, in order for them to be more resilient,” Panagiota Maragou, the Head of Conservation at the World Wildlife Fund Greece said. The chapter recently prepared a legislative proposal to use prescribed burns as a tool for fire prevention.
Cutting off low-hanging branches of trees and removing dead wood and underbrush would make forests less flammable, Arva said, making for easier wildfire seasons. The only problem is that it’s illegal.
By doing so anyway, the Ilioupoli team helped save the area in a 2015 wildfire, Arva said; flames didn’t reach the branches of the trees and, though they charred, they didn’t ignite, stopping further spread.
“We look at the mountain and see nothing but black,” volunteer firefighter Maria Arva said last week, with Athens’ Mount Hymettus looming behind her. The station was formed after a 1998 fire devastated the mountain, killing four. The 2015 fire was the second to rip down the same path. Blackened remains of pine trees still dot the hillside.
Arva is a journalist at the Greek TV station ANT1, but each summer, from May 1st to October 31st, she spends her free time fighting wildfires. The firehouse is a small wooden cabin with plump couches, a large television, and children’s art decorating the walls. Off the main living room is a radio system and several monitors, one showing footage from a nearby watchtower. Two white storage containers covered in graffiti stand outside, one with bunk-beds for late shifts, and one with personal equipment.
There isn’t a parking lot at the station; its two municipality-owned fire engines park at the end of the road. This is the first summer the trucks will live there full-time. Until this year, volunteers picked them up from the local Hellenic Fire Station each morning when the station opened, and dropped them back off at night. The team doesn’t have enough committed volunteers to staff the station all day, or all year.
Because the team doesn’t own their trucks, they can’t repair them, and Arva says that the municipality doesn’t treat them well. “They didn’t care for them, and practically they didn’t care about our lives being in that car.” The station’s main engine is from 1992, and each year of wear is evident in its dull exterior. Besides the trucks, the station otherwise relies entirely on donations for equipment.
Arva says the mountain cannot survive another fire. Pine trees don’t spread fertile seeds until they are twelve to fifteen years old, she said, and the regrowth from the 2015 fire is not yet mature enough to reproduce. “We will do whatever it takes not to be burned again,” Arva said. “It’s you do it” or the mountain is “destroyed forever.”
Yasaman Heidarpour hadn’t spoken to her parents in two years. When Israel struck Tehran, she feared she never would again.
By Noah LaBelle
The night of Thursday, June 13th, Yasaman Heidarpour was fast asleep in her Athens apartment when her husband shook her awake. Israeli bombs had struck Tehran, the city they fled nearly a decade ago. She immediately grabbed her phone. Her father’s number, which she knew by heart, wasn’t working. On Instagram, she sent messages to her parents, cousins, high school friends. None delivered; Iran was already experiencing an internet blackout that, days later, the government extended nationwide. “It’s only me and my husband here in Greece,” Heidarpour told me recently. “Everyone is back in Iran, and I couldn’t find anybody.”
After twelve days of conflict—which killed 610 Iranians and injured 4,746 more—Israel and Iran agreed to a ceasefire on June 24th. The next day, while working at the Melissa Network, an Athens-based organization supporting migrant women, Heidarpour noticed her messages had gone through. Her father replied at once: all was well, the internet was back, and if she had time, they could talk.
Heidarpour, who is thirty-one, hadn’t spoken with her parents in two years. Still, she called straight after work. Once on the line, her parents downplayed everything, saying the airstrikes were nothing serious. Their faces, visibly frightened, told another story—“like they were ten years older,” Heidarpour said. When she asked more questions, her father insisted there was no need, steering the conversation to daily life.
The call brought back complex emotions of what she’d left behind. “I felt really relieved that they are well,” Heidarpour told me, “but still, everything is the same.” As her parents spoke, past memories of never having the right to complain or talk resurfaced.
***
When she was ten, Heidarpour tried to tell her mother about a man who had harassed her on the streets of Tehran. Before she finished, her mother slapped her: “You don’t say it to anybody—not even to me.” After that, she stopped talking about her feelings. “I was not even saying that I was hungry,” she told me.
Nine years later, her life changed rapidly. At a wedding, while studying accounting at university, she met her future husband, a second-cousin whose family had been estranged with hers for eight years. She quickly learned why. His father, brothers, and one of his sisters were members of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, or Sepah, a force tied to militant groups fighting Western and Israeli influence. Her husband had refused to join for years, but the pressure escalated.
“When we got married, they had another option to threaten,” Heidarpour said, referring to herself. “They were threatening us with death.” In December of 2015, it took Heidarpour and her husband just a day to stuff necessities into a backpack and leave. They had no plan beyond Turkey, but found a smuggler who could get them to Greece.
The sea was frigid in Çeşme, at Turkey’s westernmost end. Four plastic fishing rafts rocked in the surf. Women and children, babies among them, were told to get in first. If there wasn’t space, the men would sit on the edges. Looking back for her husband, Heidarpour saw the smugglers holding guns and knives. Over all the crying and shouting, they growled that there was no choice: “You sit inside the boat, or you die.” When seventy people had been crammed into each, the boats set off, and were soon separated. Water rushed through a hole in hers. As the boat began to sink, she blacked out.
She came to under a large tent. Her husband told her they’d reached Chios, a Greek island seventeen kilometers from the Turkish coast. Only their boat had made it.
They reached Athens on a humanitarian boat the next night, where they landed in Eleonas, a camp already packed with over a thousand refugees. “The first thing I did,” Heidarpour said, “I just removed the scarf, and then said, ‘Okay, here I am, and I’m safe.’” They lived there, calamitously, for more than a year, until a chance encounter with an Afghan woman led Heidarpour to the Melissa Network in November of 2017. Heidarpour, who studied English for fifteen years in Turkey, had arrived just as Melissa’s lone Farsi translator went on maternity leave. She landed the gig that January.
***
What saved Heidarpour during the phone call with her parents was her two daughters, three and five, grabbing the phone. Besides calling to update her parents about their grandchildren two years ago, she kept her distance before the strikes, and hasn’t contacted her parents since. “I have more peace with myself when I’m not in communication with them,” she told me. “Otherwise, I don’t know if I will be such a good mother.”
On a recent morning, her youngest was trailing her oldest around the house, per usual. The five-year-old had had enough. She turned around and begged for just five minutes of privacy.
“My daughter already started saying her needs and thoughts and feelings,” Heidarpour said. “You cannot imagine how happy I was.” She had just finished describing her own childhood—robotic, she called it, lived exactly as programmed by her father.
“I was like, Okay, I think you’re doing well, Yasaman.” ♦
On a Cycladic island reimagined for profit, a realtor tries to preserve what made it livable.
By Valerio Castellini
A restaurant in Aliki, Paros. 2025.
People don’t have the same patience that they used to have. Then everything has to happen fast, and we change ourselves as people.
Sophia Katsipi sits behind a glass desk in her real estate agency in Parikia, the capital of Paros. The sun-bleached white walls of the office make it bright, faithful to the muted geometries of Cycladic architecture. “I renovated this myself,” she says. “This is my kind of input. I’d like to see more buildings like this.” A simple rectangular plan, minimalistic interior, and small, wooden windows. A style that has evolved over the centuries, as a result of the climatic demands of the islands. Sipping on an espresso while her white poodle circles the chairs, she mused about the island’s future.
“People from France, Switzerland, Belgium, northern Italy—they came here for the culture. They maintained the look of the island, they appreciated the traditional buildings,” she explains. “They passed on that same kind of culture to the next generation.” These visitors often stayed for months, eventually buying homes. Some relocated permanently. Most came in May or September, well before the streets of the island towns began to buckle under peak-season traffic.
But that was before Paros became an investment product. “The majority of investors, at the moment, look at the yielding,” said Katsipi. “They are not here to actually live on the island. They’re here to develop, sell, go—or redevelop, go again. They don’t really care about the effect on the island.”
Today, a wave of short-term investors, often with no plans to live on the island, are reshaping the market. Their priority is yield: building large, eye-catching villas—preferably with pools—to flip for profit or monetise through high-end rentals.
“Paros is like a mini market,” she says. “We don’t have a brand name. I’m not sure what type of tourism we want.”
This shift has profound implications—not only for what is being built, but for whom Greece is attracting. “I don’t think culture has any connection with money,” she adds.
At the center of this transformation is a paradox. The more Greece tries to grow its tourism economy, the more it risks losing the very attributes that once made it attractive: affordability, authenticity, and embeddedness. What’s vanishing is not only traditional architecture or artisanal pottery, but a form of tourism that was socially and economically symbiotic. What Katsipi calls “cultured tourism” is being priced out—by policy decisions as much as by property sales.
“People don’t have the same patience that they used to have. Then everything has to happen fast, and we change ourselves as people,” Sophia explains, building on years of observing clients go through her office. “The majority today comes as investors, they look at the yielding.”
The reasons for this shift are multiple. With national and regional authorities slow to regulate construction and incapable of consistent enforcement, island professionals have found themselves standing in for absent institutions.
In 2024, Greece received over 35.9 million international visitors—more than three times the country’s population. Total tourism spending reached €21.6 billion, making the sector one of the country’s most vital economic engines. But on the Cycladic frontlines, those tasked with translating demand into homes, stays, and space are increasingly unsure of what kind of tourism they are building toward.
“We try to educate,” Katsipi says. “You might have a person that comes and says, ‘I want to build a villa with five-meter windows,’” she explains. Architectural guidelines in Paros and surrounding islands restrict window widths to prevent oversized, floor‑to‑ceiling glazing that can disrupt the Cubic white forms of Cycladic architecture. However, often these rules are bent—small illegal acts that accumulate across the landscape, slowly eroding its visual rhythm. “Even if you manage illegally to do something like this […] when you look at the island afterwards, it will look like a suburb of Athens,” concludes Katsipi.
In the current building spree, local realtors are left to navigate the gaps. “If the architect says, ‘Don’t worry, we’ll fix it,’ who am I?” Katsipi asks. “This job is difficult. You are always in between too many people— lawyers, notaries, engineers. […] There’s only so much we can do.”
Still, many try. Katsipi helped co-found the island’s Realtors Association to promote ethical practices and defend against what she calls the “illogical logic” of state policy. In an industry where “my word is my signature” used to suffice, she now insists on contracts, disclosure, and transparency. “A business that’s not only for today, but for long-lasting, is based on ethics,” emphasises Katsipi.
Nowhere is the state’s contradiction more visible than in its approach to swimming pools. In Paros, private pools are banned outside town settlements—nominally to preserve water. Yet they remain legal within towns, where density is higher and infrastructure often weaker.
“It doesn’t make sense,” Katsipi says. “Outside town, in 8,000 square meters of land, you can build 280 square meters and have maybe three pools, max. But inside town, you can divide into 1,000-meter plots, build much more, and have four pools. It doesn’t make sense that it’s for water preservation.”
More broadly, this kind of prohibition, she argues, doesn’t reduce water use—it just fuels informal workarounds. Shallow “splash pools” are dug, then quietly deepened once the final checks have been conducted at the end of the construction process. Engineers are asked to certify legality, or to look the other way. Buyers are told not to worry.
“It’s prohibition that doesn’t correspond to legality,” she says. “It just creates another wave of illegality.”
And who gets to build legally, with full amenities? Hotels. Large developments. The very entities most capable of negotiating exceptions. “What you’re creating is cartel tourism,” she says. “You take the pools away from the normal villas where people come to for […] a bit of peace and tranquillity.” Tourists that are just looking for relaxation, that do not cram the streets. “Hotels have the right to build 30 rooms, each room with a pool,” Katsipi explains, raising the contradiction.
The real matter is that the island needs to decide what they wish to receive. Elite tourism? Mass tourism? Something in between? It has become clear that it is not possible to do everything at once.
Beneath these debates lies a deeper one about social sustainability. The form of tourism now prevailing in places like Paros has grown beyond unbalanced. It has become extractive.
When wealthy investors flip homes for profit, the local economy doesn’t grow—it inflates. Teachers and nurses can’t find housing. Essential services workers commute from other islands. Meanwhile, those who do buy homes are increasingly absent. “There’s a class of buyers who don’t even want to be here in August,” Katsipi notes. “They come in May-June or September-October. The rest of the time, the house sits empty—or is on Airbnb.”
This is not development. It is simply exponential growth. The distinction matters. Growth adds numbers. Development builds systems. At the moment, Greece has a surplus of the former and a deficit of the latter.
For Katsipi and others, the future of tourism in Greece won’t be determined by one regulation or one real estate deal. It will depend on whether the country—and especially its islands—can resist the temptation to sell everything to everyone. It will require choosing, clearly and collectively, the kind of tourism that is worth sustaining.
“It’s okay to have diversity,” Katsipi says. “But we have to decide where we’re going.”
Diana “Dida” Petríková paused for a moment on the steps outside Empros Theatre in central Athens, looking out at the hundreds of people filling the street. She saw other members of her team from HipHop4Hope, a program dedicated to empowering migrant and refugee youth in Athens, scattered throughout the crowd. She got goosebumps as she took in their work.
The April sun streamed through the colorful graffiti-filled walls lining the block. With DJ Greetana on music, artists ran graffiti and dance workshops throughout the street and people of all ages and backgrounds joined together in an afternoon of music and expression. The night continued with performances on the Empros stage, capturing the essence of the third annual Raise the Bounce event: a celebration of art, dance, and diversity through community.
“We had theater acts, big parties, so many people,” Husnain Shahid, 24, who is originally from Pakistan and has lived in Athens for eight years, said. “It was so lovely.”
Hundreds attend events like Raise the Bounce, and workshops attract groups from all over the city and beyond. “We take courage and create things,” Petríková, who moved from Slovakia to Athens last year to work as a dance teacher and coordinator for HipHop4Hope, said.
But for all its success, the program is now threatened by a global shift in political and ideological priorities that has limited the amount of funding available for NGOs.
Upon taking office on January 20, 2025, United States President Donald Trump severely cut back on the funding that USAID and the U.S. State Department could distribute to aid organizations worldwide. The impacts of these cuts have reached Greece.
HipHop4Hope fears losing funding as a grant-dependent program under Respect for Greece, a German NGO founded in 2015 to address the EU’s response to the influx of refugees and migrants arriving in Greece. There are fewer grants available for next year as philanthropists prioritize the funding of programs they deem most urgent, and ones that have supported HipHop4Hope for years are unable to give the same amount. “This is the biggest challenge,” Petríková said. “Without resources, we can’t live,” she continued.
However, in such a divisive time, HipHop4Hope is essential. Over the past 10 years, immigrants from Africa and the Middle East have arrived in Greece hoping to find a new home in the country. Not only does HipHop4Hope provide a space that fosters diversity and is inclusive of these communities, but it also gives migrant youth an outlet to change the trajectory of their lives.
Shahid joined HipHop4Hope as a student in 2019 where he learned to dance. “Before HipHop4Hope, I was not so good at meeting people. I always had anger issues,” he said. HipHop4Hope made him realize, “you can leave a good impact on anybody.”
Shahid now works as a receptionist on Kos, a tourist hotspot island in the Aegean Sea. While no longer able to frequent HipHop4Hope workshops or events, dance still holds an everyday presence in his life. He says he practices alone on the beach, and whenever he is back in Athens, dancing with his team is a priority.
Receiving two days off from work the first week of July, Shahid travelled back to Athens for less than 48 hours. Exhausted from a long day of travel, he was in bed early the night he arrived. At 10pm his phone rang. Momo Belhedi, whom Shahid met through HipHop4Hope, was on the other end of the line. “He called me and was like ‘no, no, bro come,’” Shahid said. Shahid went and practiced with his friends, dancers from HipHop4Hope, for two and a half hours that night.
HipHop4Hope hasn’t only left a permanent mark on Shahid. Petríková has seen dance transform the lives of many youth in the program, and reflected on the role art has played in her life. “I think that’s why I do it, because I feel it also saved my life, in some sense, so I know that it can help others,” she said.
HipHop4Hope provides an essential outlet for expression that would otherwise be absent from the lives of refugee and migrant youth.
“I hope we won’t be forced to stop because of these politics,” Petríková said.
Kastalia Theo was swimming in a cove off the Cycladic islands when something brushed against her leg. At first, “I pushed it away,” she said, thinking, “it was a plastic bag with a hair in it,” but as she began to have an allergic reaction, she realized it was a jellyfish.
Theo, 21, now works part-time at Archelon, a sea turtle rescue and rehabilitation center founded in 1983, located in Glyfada, a coastal neighborhood outside Athens, giving tours and educating people about turtle injuries, many caused by plastic mistaken for jellyfish or entanglement in fishing gear. Lying in the hospital after her sting, she realized, “People think, oh, how could a turtle confuse a plastic bag for a jellyfish? Are they stupid? But they’re actually really smart.”
Theo grew up in Greece, spending summers camping on Zakynthos, an island known for its threatened Loggerhead nesting beaches, a species of turtle common in the Mediterranean. Her fascination with sea turtles began here.
Greece is crucial to the survival of Loggerheads. The Greek island of Zakynthos alone hosts 80% of the Mediterranean’s nests. But tourism and climate change put them at risk. Zakynthos is one of Europe’s most overcrowded destinations. According to The Guardian, overnight stays outnumber residents 150 to one. Tourists unknowingly disrupt nesting sites by crowding beaches and playing loud music. Artificial light from beach bars confuses hatchlings, drawing them away from the moonlit sea. Climate change heats the sand, skewing hatchling sex ratios towards females. Meanwhile, shrinking fish stocks put fishermen in competition with turtles. As Theo told me, some even deliberately harm them.
The mounting threats to the turtles and her personal experience pushed her into action. A few years after her sting, she joined a nesting beach project in the Peloponnese. “I was there during the beginning of the nesting season, and with the eggs and the mother turtles, it was a smaller beach project out of all of them, but it was really nice.”
Now, Theo spends her free time educating the public. Theo introduced herself as my tour guide for the day while standing inside the teal-colored former train cars that serve as Archelon’s office. Dressed in a light blue shirt that read “Ask me about sea turtles,” and silver sea turtle hoop earrings, she led the way.
When I arrived, the power had gone out due to construction on a nearby marina. Still, the team carried on. As we walked through the open-air tanks, one turtle surfaced for a breath while a volunteer cleaned another enclosure. “We will make it work,” one said when referring to dealing with the outage.
The volunteers of Archelon embody this spirit of perseverance, adjusting release methods, caring for injured turtles, and taking them back as often as they need. One turtle, named Sophie, lost a flipper to a fishing net. “We’ve released her before, gotten a call, then brought her back, released her again, gotten a call, and brought her back,” Theo told me. But Archelon hasn’t quit on Sophie or any turtles.
“It is everything for us,” said Christiana Kamprogianni, Archelon’s communications officer. “Volunteers are how we exist and how we can protect turtles. If we didn’t have volunteers, we wouldn’t be able to do any of the work we do.”
Their efforts have been paying off in recent years; conservation teams across the Mediterranean have recorded record numbers of nests and surviving hatchlings. But while Loggerhead conservation is currently a success story, it remains a fragile one. Since Loggerheads take roughly 20 years to mature, Panagiota Maragou, WWF’s Head of Conservation, warns that the success we see today in nesting is a result of conservation work from 20 years prior. To ensure the continued protection of sea turtles, volunteers like Theo and the team at Archelon are crucial, as caretakers and educators protecting sea turtles from the increasing threats of climate change, pollution, and human encroachment.
“We just have to let nature be nature,” Theo said, and by “ helping nature be nature it means fixing the problems caused by humans.”
