The regulations governing Greek sidewalks are specific. According to a 2022 Ministerial Decision, sidewalks must be paved with a “stable, continuous, jointless paving material that facilitates wheelchair users”; the maximum permitted longitudinal slope of a sidewalk is 12%; there must be a blind guide created with tactile paving at least 0.50m from the curb; there must be ramps with a slope of up to 5% and a width of at least 1.50m; and obstacles cannot close off sidewalk corners.

The reality of Greek sidewalks is far more irregular. In Athens, trees sprout out of the middle of the pavements; blind guides lead smack into kiosks, or twist in on themselves; ramps slope at an astonishing variety of inclines and seem to have usually been commandeered by a car or motorcycle, a dumpster, metal fencing, or any number of other objects.

“I move around Athens every day. And there are often blockages,” said Nikolaos Giallouris, lawyer and president of Greece’s National Federation for the Blind. “The blind guide can lead you straight into a kiosk or a phone booth, there are tables and chairs on the sidewalk, sidewalks with broken pavements, construction sites with massive holes in the street,” he noted, sighing.

“It pains me to say it”, Giallouris says, “but Athens is plain inaccessible.”

“It certainly isn’t an accessible city,” agrees Grigoris Chrysikos, one of the founders of the “Cool Crips” advocacy group that works to raise awareness of, and help remove, the social and architectural barriers faced by people with disabilities in Greece.

“I’m an Athenian and I love my city, but we have a difficult relationship,” says Chrysikos. “It certainly doesn’t treat me very well with regard to my wheelchair.”

People with disabilities, their associations, advocates and lawyers, grandmas with their shopping trolleys, people with baby strollers, the elderly, the tired, snarky online commenters, every tourist who’s ever visited and every politician who’s ever passed through Athens have all commented on how inaccessible the city is.

Myriad promises have, of course, been made to improve Athens’ accessibility, and some of them have even been acted on. Since 2020, there have been promises to install special signage on ramps in the City of Athens to prevent illegal parking. In 2022 the Municipality promised special smart sensors on ramps and pedestrian crossings to prevent people from parking on them.

The National Accessibility Authority established in 2021 started work on a national strategy for 2024-2030 which should make Athens and Greece more accessible, and provide better support to those with disabilities.

The City of Athens has also implemented its “Athens Becomes Accessible for all” program. In March 2024, the Municipality announced that it had ​​upgraded and reconstructed 4,951 square meters of sidewalk over the course of the year, along with 3,410 square meters of public spaces and squares and ​​1,026 square meters of hazardous sidewalks and roadways.

But these initiatives and promises often fall short of what’s required.

“They built a lot of ramps last year, but they were too steep,” says Vangelis Avgoulas, a lawyer and founder of the Me Alla Matia [“Through other eyes”] NGO which provides education and consultation on issues regarding disability and accessibility. “Then they had to rebuild them all.”

The problem runs deeper than a few helter-skelter sidewalks or improperly-constructed ramps. Rather, Athens suffers from a bone-deep lack of adherence to accessibility standards in construction, refurbishment and movement around the city. This, coupled with a knotted net of responsibility that leads to both overlaps and gaps, with a lack of enforcement, and a half-hearted (at best) attempt to take people with disabilities into account in its city planning has left Athens stubbornly, unrelentingly and needlessly difficult to navigate.

Lack of adherence and enforcement

The most fundamental problem is the failure to adhere to the regulations governing accessibility. Though there are laws that forbid trees being planted in the middle of sidewalks, cars being parked on ramps, and taxi drivers from refusing to pick up people with guide dogs, all these regulations are flouted on a daily basis.

“The laws are not applied,” Giallouris says simply.

“There are no repercussions for breaking the law,” says Avgoulas. “We have no monitoring body. No fines are handed out.”

The National Accessibility Authority has no supervisory nor enforcement authority, it only has the ability to advise. There is no monitoring body.

In a 2022 Special Report on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, the Greek Ombudsman found that standards and regulations “are inadequately complied with, with failures in key construction and technical details that result in the lack of accessibility for persons with disabilities (mainly wheelchair or vehicle users).”

Chrysikos also pointed to the lack of monitoring. “One approach would be more severe policing and fines. But the correct solution is to change how people think about disabilities. They don’t see people with disabilities, so they park wherever. They ignore these things.”

There is a recurring genre of videos in Greek media of people trying to navigate the sidewalks in a wheelchair, only to encounter cars, cafe tables and a built environment that makes it impossible to do so. No amount of signs or smart sensors seem to really put a clamp on the problem.

Lack of coordination

Even when attempts are made to observe the regulations, it turns out they are often ad hoc and haphazard. The Greek Ombudsman report noted that, “There is a clear lack of consolidation of the obligation and responsibility to design for the accessibility of persons with disabilities, and non-adherence to the principles of universal design, as any compliance actions are often fragmentary and do not ensure the creation of an accessibility chain in infrastructure.”

There is a lack of coordination on multiple levels. Avgoulas explains that, in Athens, the municipality could be responsible for the sidewalks, the regional government for the street, and the Ministry of Transport for the street lights. Coordinating these different bodies is something that often simply isn’t done. Meaning that a sidewalk may have a blind guide, but the stoplight doesn’t have audio indicators. Or that the sidewalk could have proper ramps, but the square is only accessible via steps. The responsibility for repairs can be opaque and are usually delayed.

This means that even if one street or method of transit is accessible, there’s no guarantee the next step of the journey will be, too. “There is no chain of accessibility,” said Avgoulas, “For example, we have the most accessible metro, but we don’t have parking spots. There needs to be a cohesive plan from the capital.”

The Athens metro, opened in time for the Olympics and Paralympics in 2004, is generally agreed to be quite accessible. All the stations have wheelchair access, and there are usually audio announcements and tactile paths for the blind. But the parking spots are not, or the street outside the metro station may not have a stoplight equipped with audio indicators.

Additionally, the elevators frequently break down, leaving people in a lurch. However, an app has been rolled out over the last year which provides live updates on which stations are fully operational, so people at least know before they arrive if they will be able to exit and enter the stations.

Lack of cooperation with those who have disabilities

Every advocate who spoke to To Vima International Edition agreed that these problems could be mitigated swiftly and simply, if people with disabilities were simply involved in the planning and decision-making processes.

“You see that money has been thrown at the problem, but no one has seriously addressed the issues,” said Chrysikos. “If they worked with people with disabilities from the start, they wouldn’t have issues like this. It’s stupid.”

The first Vice Mayor of the National Accessibility Authority is herself blind, and has promised to bring both her expertise and lived experience to bear on the topic.

But most approaches still remain in the realm of plans and promises. “The government was supposed to have provided a platform for mapping every public building. That was the plan for three years”, says Avgoulas, “but no one knows what happened to it.”

“This country takes decisions without coordination,” says Avgoulas. “But disability touches on every aspect of life, so they need to approach it more horizontally.”