One of the things I love most about Athens is how it’s bathed in a clash of visual juxtapositions. From its fascinating architectural diversity and wealth of historical markings of different periods, to the cultural potpourri of its neighbourhoods, my city is never one thing at a time. For anyone interested in typography, Athens’ offerings are equally, if not all the more, exciting. You can find yourself in a hip designer bookstore skimming through the latest typography book while at the same time gazing at a decades-old, hand-painted sign across the window. Some see all this as chaos. But to me, this dense overlap of visual information, the contrast of voices, forms and textures, is what makes Athens so wonderful to explore. And it’s what I wish to preserve.
When talking about preservation in the context of a city’s components, typography is not really at the top of the list. It is, however, a strong link to our past, and paired with architecture it can tell great stories that offer us an unexpected way to make sense of our cities and strengthen our sense of continuity. As the layers of past typography in public space rapidly fade away, their value and significance has started to be apparent. How will Athens look without its shop signs that have lasted for three generations? How would any city look like if we swapped custom made signs, based on our century or millennia-old alphabets, for language accessible ones?
Athens has a type
In Greece, we (designers) tend to forget that we are still using one of the world’s oldest alphabets. From ancient inscriptions to recent vernacular (see below), Athens shelters a wide range of type samples that we can study, not only to find inspiration for future typefaces, but also to better understand our own culture.
Linear and geometric type can be spotted at ancient ruins, and one can easily identify Byzantine handwriting during a visit to any Orthodox church in Athens. Roman type, monumental in size in order to instil authority, can be seen on large institutions and central banks, while modern, easy-to-read type can be spotted on street signs, or signage systems at the city’s transportation hubs. Script type (or calligraphic) has tons of applications and it often attracts our attention with its delicate, interconnecting letters. And we can spot the influence of the West on modern type, indicating innovation and a global outlook, on local design labels as well as international brands.
While observing modern Athenian signs we can reach the very interesting conclusion that most of them are not written in an intact typeface. Rather, they are the result of experimentations by non-professional typographers that range from applications of one’s personal handwriting to crooked uses of Latin typefaces. This (or similar) local visual dialect is what we call vernacular, the sort of typography that showcases a city's anonymous graphic design history. This is what I am mostly interested in recording and featuring in my walking tours.
The beauties
Apart from a few examples, such as Las Vegas and Hong Kong, signs are not yet perceived as part of a city’s heritage, and as such they are usually discarded or, at best, reused. Walking around in the heart of Athens, around the areas of Omonia and Monastiraki, one can still discover corners untouched by gentrification. Inside the city centre’s stoas (arcades) you can come across some well-preserved postwar hand-painted signs, just like the one in Stoa Kairi that belonged to a gun repairer. This one specifically is remarkable, due to the three different versions of the Omega letter (Ω), arguably the most potent of Greek characters. The co-existence of the three alternates could be read as an unfortunate inconsistency or as the creator’s knack for delight. However, for the type designer interested in mapping a city’s fading typography, this is like striking gold.
At the entrance of the same passageway, if you look closely at the main sign, you should be able to distinguish the remnants of an older hand-painted sign. Interestingly enough, both old and new types are of the same family. Such handpainted signs are the rarest to spot and are usually where one can witness the finest samples of Greek sign painting. Walk a bit further towards Omonia and you will find more of these, like the “ΝΕΟΝ ΑΘΗΝΑΙ Φωτειναί Επιγραφαί" (“Neon Athine Fotine Epigrafe”, meaning “Neon Athens Light Signs”) on Theatrou Street, or, if you’re moving closer to Plaka, above the textile shops along Mitropoleos Street.
More appealing to the wider audience seem to be the script types, aka the calligraphic. Should you take a moment to observe such signs, you’ll begin to see that some of them don’t even form a specific, complete typeface, but are rather custom lettering, something quite close to personal handwriting. The idea hidden behind this is the communication of the brand’s quality, attention to detail, or even premium services and products.
And the beasts
Yet to me, the most intriguing typefaces are the extended ones of the analogue era. The thick and thin San Serifs, which can force their way into occupying the whole facade of a shop. Ariston bakery on Voulis Street is a great example of crowning typography. The type is placed along the sign in order to follow the building's structure and clearly communicates that here you will find small business products. Their star product, tyropites (cheese pies) is vertically written on each side with the letters highlighted horizontally resulting in an awkwardly thick form. Funnily enough such disproportionate applications were quite trendy in the 2010s, treatments that traditional typographers would reject.
One of my favourite type forms in Athens can be found at some of the city’s overground train stations (green line). Monastiraki, Omonia, and Victoria train stops proudly wear this geometric modernist type against their shiny retro-tiled walls; an iconic imagery and one very, very Athenian. Letters are thick and wide, most probably a tampered version of a 1930s Din typeface, and they come with an impressive lowercase “a” that can’t be found anywhere else in the city.
Then there is of course, the “Frankenstein” kind of letterings that are born out of the daring ill-stitching of Latin characters in order to form Greek ones. Like the “disκoi κaσσeτes” (“diski kassetes”, meaning “records and tapes”) sign at the Nikos Xylouris record store, where both Greek and Latin alphabets are used in a rather creative way, such as rotating the Latin “a” to produce a Greek “σ” (sigma, the lowercase “s” letter).
Many who come on my walking tours become so fascinated with this foreign-looking script, that they initiate a game of attempting to read the signs set in Greek. Signs like the Xylouris’ Greeklish one (the result of writing Greek using Latin characters) are invitations to curiosity, entry points to discovering the similarities and differences between cultures. This sort of type may seem wrong to the eyes of a type designer, but to me, this variety, with its playful, casual results, is the sincere image of Athens.
Then come the more sophisticated ones, like the ones found in newer versions of the same sign that stands right next to the old one as if completing a story. These are fine examples of assertive Greek lettering, that manage to speak tradition with a modern voice, defining a certain “Greekness”. It is especially in this kind of type where the “Υ” or the “Κ” stand out and make a statement. Craftsmanship and inspiration lie behind this sort of type design, qualities that are missing from today’s examples.
Follow the signs
The best place for someone to start their typographic journey is definitely Stoa Emporon (Merchant’s Arcade). Back in 2015, the group Beforelight who create large-scale light art interventions in public spaces, gathered old shop signs from family-owned stores that had shut down around Voulis Street with a goal to “bring light” to the run-down Athenian arcade. Though the type specimens on display are mostly by craftspeople, rather than graphic designers, the diversity of typefaces, materials and techniques that are gathered offer a great crash test on local typography.
For a more design-ish introduction to Athens’ current type scene, make sure to drop by Parachute Typefoundry in the area of Psirri. There, Panos Vassiliou along with his team design new Greek typefaces and often hold events open to the public, as well as organise lectures, workshops, exhibitions and multidisciplinary projects. They also have a limited collection of merch items such as publications and everyday paraphernalia centred around typography, of course. The areas of the Historic Centre and Plaka are home to plenty of sophisticated souvenir shops where you can get an idea of what Greek type designers are up to nowadays. At Hyper Hypo contemporary bookstore in Monastiraki, you can surely spot a book (or more) focused on design and typography.
Last, but definitely not least, the Epigraphic Museum, housed on the south wing ground floor of the National Archaeological Museum, holds an invaluable trove of ancient Greek, Latin, Hebrew, Phoenician, and Ottoman inscriptions (the era’s signs) that date back to 800 BCE.
