Athens Walk: Post-Lockdown Recovery 2020

Syntagma Square owes its name — "Constitution Square" — to the events of September 1843, when a crowd gathered here to demand Greece's first constitution from King Otto, the Bavarian prince installed as monarch after independence. The square in front of the former Royal Palace, now the Hellenic Parliament, has carried that name ever since.

Walk north from there and you're on Ermou Street, laid out in 1833 as one of the new capital's first planned roads and named for Hermes, the messenger god of trade — fitting, since it's been Athens' main shopping street for nearly two centuries. It empties into Monastiraki, whose own name is older and humbler: "little monastery," after the small Pantanassa church that still stands in the square, a fragment of a larger monastery that once stood there.

On the first Saturday after Greece's 2020 lockdown began to lift, this is the route this video walks — past a fountain built to commemorate a 19th-century revolution, down a shopping street named after a god, into a square named for a vanished monastery — except the cafés are takeaway-only, the restaurants are dark until June, and everyone on the metro is wearing a mask. Centuries of history, caught mid-pause.