Greece and graffiti go way back: The world’s earliest surviving graffito may in fact be an ancient Greek advertisement for a brothel. More contemporary Greek taggers expressed their political beliefs during World War II and the country’s ensuing civil war and military dictatorship of the late 1960s and early 1970s.
In the 1990s, a wave of elaborate public street art—an extension of graffiti that’s often more figurative than (and sometimes in tension with) its progenitor—spread throughout Athens. Today, with much of its surfaces coated in images that often comment on the country’s economic crisis, Athens has been hailed as a “mecca” for street art in Europe.
With such a long and storied history, it’s perhaps no surprise that a group has taken it upon itself to preserve the city’s street art. Four years ago, art and conservation students at the Technological Educational Institute of Athens founded st.a.co.—short for Street Art Conservators—to maintain some of their city’s works of public art. The students had been documenting street art for a class, and were so taken with some of the examples that they decided to help protect them from the elements (and other graffiti artists).
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