The latest print issue of Greece Is magazine – Greece Is Athens Winter 2025-2026 – will be available together with The New York Times International Edition – Kathimerini English Edition this weekend (20-21/12/25), everywhere that international press is sold throughout Greece. In addition, you’ll soon be able to order the issue from anywhere in the world through our e-shop, or download a digital version from our website.

Athens reveals itself differently in winter. The pace slows, the light softens, and the city’s deeper layers come into focus. Greece Is Athens Winter 2025-2026 invites you to experience the capital at its most reflective, intimate and lived-in – a season when everyday life becomes the truest guide.

In this winter edition, we turn our attention to the rhythms that shape Athens beyond the obvious. We walk the city at human pace, guided by memory, habit and curiosity. We explore neighborhoods defined by decades of change, where personal stories intersect with urban history, and discover how life unfolds beside some of the world’s most powerful landmarks.

We meet Athenians who share the places, tastes and rituals that anchor them to the city – from favorite walks and comforting dishes to crafts kept alive by new hands. We step inside workshops where traditional skills are being revived, listen to folk songs that still echo through tavernas and cultural spaces, and trace the living relationship between music, dance and the city’s soul.

This issue also looks closely at Athens as a cultural force: from the enduring legacy of Dimitris Pikionis and the long journey of the Parthenon Sculptures, to the rise of the Greek National Opera and the city’s ongoing dialogue with philosophy, patronage and civic life.

Food remains a constant thread, with a celebration of the dishes Athenians return to time and again, and a journey through classic patisseries that have shaped the city’s palate across generations.

Greece Is Athens Winter 2025-2026 is an invitation to walk a little further, listen more closely and see the city not as a destination, but as a place to inhabit.

Here follows the editorial of the latest issue

By Giorgos Tsiros

Athens is enjoying a moment of renewed confidence. Its energy is palpable – in its cultural scene, its nightlife, its creative communities and its growing appeal as a place to live and work, including for digital nomads drawn to the city’s rhythm and warm openness. The city’s star is shining brightly once again, fueled by a sense of momentum and possibility.

Yet beneath this positive momentum lies a quieter, more enduring question: how Athens chooses to care for the layers of meaning that shaped it. Few figures embody this challenge more clearly than Dimitris Pikionis, whose work continues to offer a model of architectural thought rooted in landscape, memory and human scale.

This sketch, part of the preparatory work for Pikionis’ celebrated landscaping of the pedestrian routes around the Acropolis and Filopappou Hill (1954-1958), is currently on display at the remarkable exhibition “Dimitris Pikionis: An Aesthetic Topography,” on view until January 26. It serves as a timely reminder that as Athens looks confidently to the future, the thoughtful stewardship of its architectural heritage remains one of its most pressing responsibilities.