Just down the same street, he has stenciled a fake road sign with a little car in the blue and white Greek colours tumbling off a crumbling euro currency sign into the water. The artist, who uses the name Wild Drawing, says the mural can be seen as mirroring the lot of most Greeks during the austerity years. On the crepitating stucco below, a battered 5-euro banknote is painted.
Flanked by the shuttered windows of an abandoned old house, a haggard face supported in its hands looks out of a wall. One such artwork is in the central Exarcheia district, an anarchist and leftist hangout with more than its fair share of defaced buildings. Over the past five years of Greece's economic depression, more and more paintings comment on the country's financial and social woes. Most seem devoid of any purpose, other than that of a dog marking its territory.īut amid it, meticulously-executed, thought-provoking gems can be found.
Now, it's hard to find a building, private or public, whose walls are not blighted by black, red, blue (that's usually the neo-Nazis) or silver spray-paint. Graffiti in Athens used to be all about football, politics or teenage crushes - silly enough to be laughed off, rare enough to be frowned upon.