Cover of Stay Informed about Greece with Planetwonk

Stay Informed about Greece with Planetwonk

Stay Informed about Greece with Planetwonk

By: Modern Greece Beyond the Tourist Trail
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Greece is more than the Acropolis, beaches and postcards. Planetwonk takes you inside the politics, society, culture, economy and tourism shaping the country today — explaining what’s happening, why it matters, and what the headlines leave out.

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Episodes
  • Ancient Athens, Meet America First

    Ancient Athens, Meet America First
    11 Oct 2026
    Welcome to this week’s Planetwonk briefing — your weekly download of the stories that don’t make it onto the postcards.We’ve expanded our footprint: you can now listen to this briefing as a podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube, or your favorite app.Rubio Takes America First to the Hill Where Athens VotedFirst, the venue. The Pnyx is the rocky hill facing the Acropolis where Athenian citizens once gathered to debate, vote, and occasionally shout each other down. On Wednesday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio spoke there with the Parthenon in the background, in a carefully staged production: four video cameras, one of them on a crane. The ancient Athenians managed their assemblies without a crane shot, though they never lacked for oratory.The message: Western countries have lost confidence in themselves, and loyalty to your own nation is nothing to apologize for. Rubio urged the ancient Greek virtues of heroism, honor and duty and declared that America under Trump has chosen “the unapologetic pursuit of national power.” The speech echoed Vice President JD Vance’s 2025 Munich address, and Vance shared the video on X. Rubio is widely seen as a contender for the 2028 Republican nomination, which is why many American commentators read the speech as much for his future as for Greece’s past.The business end was the sixth Greece–US Strategic Dialogue, co-chaired with Foreign Minister Giorgos Gerapetritis and the first led by a sitting secretary of state. The headline deliverable was $4 billion in US arms sales, including about $1 billion to upgrade 37 of Greece’s F-16s and munitions for its F-16s and future F-35s. Rubio called Greece a “model ally,” and Athens will not mind the attention. It may mind the fine print: in an interview with Kathimerini, Rubio said President Trump wants F-35s delivered to Turkey once the S-400 obstacle is resolved, while also describing a Greek–Turkish conflict as unthinkable. Turkish media had already noted that Ankara was not on this trip’s itinerary, which also took in Iceland and Portugal.Not everyone applauded. On Tuesday evening, police figures put the crowd in central Athens at anywhere from more than 2,000 to over 3,000 protesters, responding to calls from the union linked to the Communist Party (KKE), along with student and left-wing groups. Police blocked the march before it reached the US Embassy, and demonstrations in the centre were banned from Wednesday until Rubio left on Thursday.Where things stand: a warm official visit, a very photogenic speech, and a crowd outside that saw the same visit rather differently. Ancient Athens has been cited in support of nearly every political programme since the Renaissance, and none of the Athenians is available for comment.Greece’s Far Right Wants the AfD’s Results, Not Necessarily the AfDPolitical parties have always borrowed from abroad. Sometimes it is a slogan, sometimes a campaign strategy, and sometimes the whole brand. This autumn the brand on display is Germany’s Alternative for Germany, or AfD, which surged into first place in a September state election in Saxony-Anhalt and leads national surveys, according to AP.Greece’s far right is watching, but not in step. Kyriakos Velopoulos, whose Greek Solution has sat in parliament since 2019 and, according to To Vima, polls strongest on the far right, said his own party is enjoying a surge like the AfD’s. Afroditi Latinopoulou, the MEP who leads Voice of Reason, said only that she is glad when citizens wake up. Others kept their distance, and To Vima’s verdict was that the AfD finds few friends on the Greek far right. Everyone wants the polling. Fewer want to be photographed in the jersey.Then there is the wildcard. Ilias Kasidiaris, the former Golden Dawn spokesman, walked out of Domokos prison on September 15, after about six years of a sentence of more than 13 for helping lead what Greek courts ruled a criminal organisation. He promised a “new, strong national party, such as those dominating all of Europe.” There are obstacles. Legal experts say he is barred from running for office until 2033, and Greek law bars parties led by convicted felons, so a week later he said he would back the Alliance of Greeks, a party formed in 2025 that he says has a parliamentary group. Whether it can stand is a matter for the Supreme Court. Elon Musk, a backer of the AfD, had complained publicly about Kasidiaris’s continued jailing in July.Copying a foreign model is harder than it looks. Greece’s threshold for entering parliament is 3%, and a crowded field splits the vote rather than growing it. The camp also has a habit of litigating against itself: in 2023 the Supreme Court excluded several far-right parties from the ballot, including Latinopoulou’s then-party Patrida, after rival challenges over party names. And Greece’s own history, from the debt crisis to Golden Dawn’s criminal-organisation conviction, means any import would need ...
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    14 min
  • “We Can Do This to Any Country We Want”

    “We Can Do This to Any Country We Want”
    4 Oct 2026
    Welcome to this week’s Planetwonk briefing — your weekly download of the stories that don’t make it onto the postcards.We’ve expanded our footprint: you can now listen to this briefing as a podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube, or your favorite app.The Ambassador, the Dinner Party, and the Sentence Nobody Can Agree OnFirst, the cast. Kimberly Guilfoyle is a former Fox News host and political fundraiser who was engaged to Donald Trump Jr. until they separated late in 2024. Trump nominated her as ambassador to Greece, calling her a longtime friend and ally, and the Senate confirmed her in September 2025. Admirers see an envoy with a direct line to the president. Critics see nepotism with a diplomatic passport.Late last week, the Wall Street Journal published an investigation into her deal-making across Europe, and Athens has talked about little else since, which, in a city that argues about everything, is saying something. The story comes in two parts: a business story and a sentence.The business first. The Journal reports that Greek-American businessman Christos Marafatsos kept turning up at her diplomatic meetings, so often that some foreign officials reportedly assumed he was on her staff. He was the guest who gets mistaken for the help. U.S. filings show his lobbying firm represents Aktor Energy, a Greek construction group that has moved into gas, and that it earned $160,000 in lobbying income over three quarters. Aktor denies improper promotion, her lawyer denies favoritism, and Marafatsos says his work advances U.S. interests. The backdrop is the Vertical Corridor, basically a gas highway running north from Greece into southeastern Europe, carrying U.S. liquefied natural gas among other things. Secretary of State Marco Rubio says it has bipartisan support in Washington.Now the sentence. The Journal reports that at a March 18 embassy dinner in Athens, Guilfoyle argued with Energy Minister Stavros Papastavrou. Talking about Romania’s looming government collapse, she allegedly said “We can do this to any country we want,” and added that it could happen here. The Financial Times later reported that a person familiar with the dinner supported the account. Her lawyer disputes the description.Then the headlines, being headlines, couldn’t leave well enough alone. Some Greek outlets upgraded the reported line to “we can topple any government.” The words attributed to her contain neither “topple” nor “government.” Somewhere between the dinner table and the front page, the sentence got a promotion.Athens has responded carefully. Government spokesman Pavlos Marinakis said there was never any question of a threat against the Greek government. In Parliament on Friday, Papastavrou said there was never any pressure or threats and called relations with Washington “at a historic high.” Asked for a yes or no on whether the exchange happened, he said it isn’t his job to comment on press reports. Denying a threat is not the same as denying the sentence, and no one has publicly offered an alternative account of the dinner.The Romania fact-check helps a little. The FT reports that Guilfoyle later met Social Democratic leader Sorin Grindeanu and then-energy minister Bogdan Ivan in Bucharest, and that Romania’s government fell in May after the Social Democrats withdrew. The FT said it’s unclear whether she urged them to leave the coalition. Grindeanu denies discussing gas contracts and says Prime Minister Bolojan was not brought down by the Americans, “the Loch Ness monster or Bigfoot.” It’s a curious lineup, and only one of the three has ever been seen at an embassy dinner.The coda: Rubio praised her this weekend as “extremely effective.” He lands in Athens Tuesday evening for the Greece–US Strategic Dialogue and leaves Wednesday morning, so it’s a short visit with a lot of small talk to avoid. Some U.S. Democrats are calling for a probe, and the KKE has called for protests against the visit. In May, Guilfoyle told journalists that Trump would visit Athens before the end of 2026, and government sources said they had no knowledge of that.Where things stand: one disputed sentence, one documented lobbying relationship, one warm endorsement from the Secretary of State, and a dinner with more than a dozen guests, which is a lot of potential memories for one evening.Tempi’s Crash Site Gets a CourtroomOn the night of February 28, 2023, a passenger train carrying students from Athens to Thessaloniki collided with a freight train at Tempi. Fifty-seven people died. Investigators blamed a station master’s routing mistake that put both trains on the same track, plus staff shortages and an ageing railway with no modern safety controls. Tens of thousands have protested since, under the slogan “I have no oxygen,” taken from a victim’s call to the emergency line.The anger has never been only about the collision. It’s also about what happened to the site afterward, and...
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    17 min
  • The Six Deaths That Could Change Athens's Airbnb Debate

    The Six Deaths That Could Change Athens's Airbnb Debate
    27 Sep 2026
    Welcome to this week’s Planetwonk briefing — your weekly download of the stories that don’t make it onto the postcards.We’ve expanded our footprint: you can now listen to this briefing as a podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube, or your favorite app.Plaka Explosion Exposes a Defenseless CityFriday morning, a devastating explosion brought a small, aging building on Lysikratous Street in Plaka down in a matter of seconds. The blast was so powerful it rattled windows as far away as Pangrati. The human toll is now finalized and heartbreaking: six people are dead. Rescue crews recovered the bodies of the British-Greek couple who lived on the top floor, alongside four American tourists staying in the first-floor short-term rental. The tourists included newlyweds on their honeymoon and a woman reportedly three months pregnant.Investigators have officially ruled out a propane canister. The leading theory is now a massive natural gas leak, likely ignited by a spark from something as simple as a light switch. But a spark is just the immediate cause; the deeper issue is a structurally defenseless city.Greek outlets and local residents’ committees are already calling this “the file that opens the question of Airbnb safety,” and they’re not wrong. While hotels must answer to strict regulatory chambers, a booking platform does nothing to verify if a mid-20th-century building without a modern load-bearing frame is safe to inhabit. Plaka is precisely where this regulatory gap was always going to show itself: a protected, ancient district whose housing stock has been quietly converted into unregulated, short-term hotel rooms.But this tragedy cuts beyond an algorithm’s blind spots. Residents in the area reported smelling gas since Thursday afternoon, yet no official intervention occurred before the blast. Athens has grown into a city where underground networks are so poorly mapped that utility crews routinely dig blind, simply because mapping the subterranean grid costs “too much time and money.” When a booking app knows more about a guest’s departure time than the municipality knows about its own gas lines, “unlucky” stops being the honest word for what happened. The honest question—how many more Lysikratous 15s are standing in central Athens right now—is one this city is very good at not asking until it has to.Justice and Dereliction in the Kyriaki Griva CaseOn April 1, 2024, 28-year-old Kyriaki Griva walked into the Agioi Anargyroi police station with a friend, afraid for her life, and asked for a patrol car home. The duty officer sent her outside to call the police emergency line instead. The dispatcher who picked up told her — in a line that’s since become shorthand for the whole case — that patrol cars aren’t taxis. Minutes later, while she was still on that call a few meters from the station’s own guard post, her ex-partner caught up with her and stabbed her five times. She died before help arrived.An internal review afterward found service failures and handed out sanctions her family called “ridiculous” — a few months’ leave, a small fine. It’s taken until now for the case against the officers themselves to move: on September 8, an Athens judicial council formally referred four of them — the duty officer, the supervisor, the station guard, and the emergency dispatcher — to stand trial for fatally exposing her to danger through omission.That’s separate from her killer’s own appeal, which was due to be heard this month and has instead been postponed to February 15, 2027, after his lawyer fell ill — over the family’s objection that a case this sensitive shouldn’t keep dragging on. Two proceedings, two courtrooms, two very different clocks: one asking whether a stalker’s conviction holds up, the other asking whether the people paid to protect that night bear any responsibility for what happened after they didn’t.Greece Is Building a Credit Score for a Country That’s Already UnderwaterGreece has spent 2026 quietly assembling the infrastructure for a state-run credit score. The Bank of Greece switched on its own Central Credit Registry in January, letting people see their own credit history for free for the first time. Riding behind it, the Ministry of Finance has been building a companion pair: a Private Debt Monitoring Registry that aggregates what people owe across banks, utilities, and landlords, and a Credit Assessment System that turns it into a single letter grade, A to D, based on how reliably someone pays the state.To be fair to the system’s designers: it doesn’t fire on its own. The grade only gets pulled when you apply for credit or explicitly consent to a check, and nothing forces a landlord or lender to reject a low score — and in principle, more accurate data could make it easier for people the old system overlooked to get credit at all. The worry, raised already in parliamentary questions to the ministry, is what happens...
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    10 min
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