Ermou Street Shopping & Monastiraki Food Walk, Athens

This walk's real subject is commerce and grilled meat — two things Athens has been doing on this exact stretch of streets for close to two hundred years.

Ermou Street was named after Hermes, the god of trade, when architects Stamatios Kleanthis and Eduard Schaubert laid out the plan for the newly declared Greek capital in 1833 — commerce was written into the street's name before a single shop existed. Textile merchants moved in by 1837, the road got its first paving in 1838, and it stayed a working street for traffic until 1995, when the city began pedestrianizing it in stages; the section nearest Syntagma opened to walkers in 1998, the rest by 2003. Two centuries later it's one of the most expensive retail streets in the world, and still fundamentally what its name always promised it would be.

Where Ermou ends, Monastiraki starts feeding people instead of selling to them. Two souvlaki tavernas near Mitropoleos Street have been doing that since long before this video existed: Thanasis, grilling since 1964, and Bairaktaris, whose kebab recipe traces back to 1925 and a Greek refugee from Asia Minor named Isaak Meraklidis, before Spiros Bairaktaris bought the place in 1980 and put his own name on it. Both are still standing, still busy, on the same corners they've always occupied.

This is what TravelHubCam is here to show you: not a single landmark, but the shopping street and the souvlaki corner that have kept this part of Athens running, night after night, for most of the city's modern existence.