Usually awash with tourists and the young who’ve made Greece’s capital a summer hot spot and brought a buzz to the little alleyway restaurants and bars, this year COVID-19 is keeping them away, the streets far less full.
Athens is not a charming city, a concrete pit of ugliness and graffiti and decrepit buildings abandoned classical homes showing the wear and tear of modern urban life, which new Mayor Kostas Bakoyiannis is trying to change with beautification.
There’s now an experimental Grand Walk for pedestrians and bicyclists, lanes for cars and trucks and buses and taxis being cut out and the crime den of Omonia Square, a hangout for migrants too, now has a fountain as it did in its 1950’s-60’s heyday.
With fewer tourists than expected to bring a slight resurgence of the Coronavirus, the New Democracy government, not wanting a second lockdown, has made masks mandatory in many public spaces.
That’s being widely defied or ignored but you can see many people on public transport, especially the metro, and in stores, wearing masks although social distancing is just a slogan now and the numbers are down in the capital, with many concerts barred.
The Grand Walk, reported The Voice of America (VOA) in a feature, is an ambitious plan to reclaim nearly half of the city’s main car lanes, turning them into about 7 kilometers (4.35 miles) of car-free pedestrian walkways and 3 kilometers (1.86 miles) for bicycles.
Read the full report at thenationalherald.com
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