“If you want to really understand our city, you need to seek out what I call ‘it’s underbelly’”, jokes Katerina, my guide from the tour company Alternative Athens, as we duck beneath blue-green portals and enter the century-old kafenio that Hans Christian Andersen dubbed one of the most luxurious cafes in Europe. This is I Oraia Ellas (Beautiful Greece), a kafenion dating to 1839.
Deriving from the Turkish kahvehane, meaning coffee house, these storied kafenai, where local men – even now, the customer base is mostly male – come to chew the fat, discuss politics, play tavli (backgammon) or make business deals, have played an essential role in Athenian daily life since the 19th century.
Despite a decline in popularity in the 1970s, as young people preferred more modern drinking spaces, Athens still has several hundred of these traditional establishments. Many have existed for more than a century and still have the traditional decor: caned seats, circular metal tables and walls lined with faded photos and posters.
Most of these cafes are in the Monastiraki, Plaka and Exarcheia areas, all within central Athens. Exploring these neighbourhoods on foot is perfect in autumn, when the temperature hovers around the low twenties. With eight historic cafes now inscribed on Greece’s Intangible Cultural Heritage list, I set out with Katerina to visit four of her favourites.
Given its proximity to Monastiraki’s crowded flea market, I’m expecting I Oraia Ellas to be a touristy hangout serving watery brews, but it’s mainly Greeks inside. They sip strong, syrupy elleniko coffee that’s still made in a briki copper pot heated over a bed of sand.
With walls covered in news clippings about celebrities who’ve visited over the years, alongside posters of German ads dating back to the time when Greece was ruled by Bavarian King Otto, it’s like walking into a scene from the classic sixties film Never on a Sunday.
Katerina tells me that, from the 1800s right up until the 1940s, MPs, scientists, journalists and European worthies came to rub shoulders and exchange ideas here. In fact, the coffee house was considered such a hotbed of progressive ideas that successive Greek governments would send their secret agents to listen in on conversations at the venue – which, during the Second World War, became the site of a Gestapo HQ.
Ushering me to the second floor, Katerina points to striking views of the Acropolis on the opposite hillside. “These views are the cafe’s best-kept secret,” she says, finishing her elleniko and then flipping over the cup to do a kafemanteia (fortune-telling) with the coffee grounds, as Greeks have done for centuries.
Out in the bustling streets again, we duck into secret alleys and cobbled sokaki near Plaka, stopping off to admire the wooden galleries and restored rooms in the 16th-century Benizelos Mansion, which is the modern city’s oldest known residential dwelling.
We’re on our way to O Glykis, a decades-old cafe that’s said to have been a favourite of British travel writer and Second World War hero Patrick Leigh Fermor. With its gleaming wooden bar well stocked in bottles of aniseed ouzo and of tsipouro – a spirit made from grape pomace; and its circular marble-topped tables and painted wooden sign above the door, it’s like the set from another one of the sixties films that are a fixture on Greek TV.
Pulling up caned chairs on the pavement, before heading for our next stop we sip tumblers of pine-scented retsina and snack on meze such as dakos – rusks piled with tomato and cheese, in this case mizithra – marinated anchovies, and bites of graviera cheese from Naxos.
Passing the Black Duck, an elegant neoclassical building – now a museum – where King Otto settled after his wedding to 17-year-old Amalia, we plunge into the graffiti-and-mural decorated streets of Exarcheia. A far cry from royal abodes, this lively district is historically linked to anarchist movements and left-wing culture.
Just around the corner from antique bookstores and university buildings on Akadimias Street, we stumble upon no-frills kafenion Kapetan Michalis (Fidiou st 3), which opened back in the sixties.
Named for the Cretan freedom fighter in Nikos Kazantzakis’ eponymous novel, this hole-in-the-wall cafe, with walls covered in black-and-white photos, is like a time capsule.
We’re serenaded by the click of backgammon counters and the rustle of newspapers as we snaffle saucers brimming with meze snacks – cuttlefish stewed in wine, split peas with capers, pork braised with mustard – that are rustled up on a two-ring gas stove from ingredients bought fresh each day from the Varvakeios food market.
This is the heart of the city’s historic kafenion district. The further we plunge into this parallel world, far from the tourist crowds, the more it feels as if we’re in a time warp where palia ellada – Greece of yesteryear – is still alive and kicking.
One of the city’s oldest kafenions, I Mouria, which opened in 1915, is our last stop. More than a café, it’s like a social club where elderly men, spruced and clean pressed after their siesta, gossip about politics and play with their komboloi worry beads. Here, we meet a piece of living history: Dimitris Papachristos, who lives close by, launched a student radio station during the 1973 Polytechnic uprising. His voice, calling people to resistance, became inextricably linked with the struggle to overthrow the junta.
“This kafenion is my village – this is where we’ve all met up for decades,” he tells me. “It’s one of few places that hasn’t changed. I hope it never will,” he adds, raising his thimble of tsipouro to the black and white photos lining the walls.
Booking it
Several airlines offer flights between the UK and Athens. The writer was a guest of La Divina, a historic hotel that was once an opera house where Maria Callas performed. Rooms from £171, breakfast included. ariahotels.gr/hotels/ladivina
A three-hour private walking tour of Athens’ historic cafes with Alternative Athens costs from £38. Private and group tours available. Expect a maximum of 15 punters on a group tour. alternativeathens.com