Concord. One of the most famous squares in Greece and Athens. In the past decades we have connected it with dozens of events, it is the meeting point of countless people, the place of celebrations in victories and triumphs of Greek teams and National Greece.
He changed his appearance many times and this time is in the process of another facelift.
In the last two decades its popularity has lost. The aesthetic interventions of the previous years but also the general degradation of the area in combination with the economic crisis turned the once glamorous square into a shadow of itself.
Dirty, abandoned, damaged in many places, with bad smells and rubbish. A square that many cross but few want to stand or observe.
And yet in all this gloomy image of hers, there is a group of people who have managed to see it differently. To look for the cracks of its ugliness and to locate the romance, the beauty, the diversity that this historical square hides in its bowels.
It is the team of "Omonia Lovers". Eight people who decided to capture in 30 photos what they saw and present it at the "Petit Paris d 'Athenes" events that will take place in Bagion from Friday 22 November to 1 December.
The team of "Omonia Lovers" consists of two photographers, two graphic designers, two artists, a pharmacist and a translator.
They used cameras with traditional film, digital cameras and even mobile phones to capture with their eyes what most of us cannot see when we cross the center of Athens.
It all started ten years ago, when Stratos Neslehanidis -one of the two photographers of the company - took a photo of two young people kissing on the stairs of the ISAP of Omonia.
He uploaded it on social media with the hashtag # ομονοια_λόρες. This was the occasion for the idea of a photo group to be born and the 8 friends started taking photos, moments of Athens with Omonia in its center.
Ο Vangelis Gravaritis, one of the two graphic designers of the team created the logo.
According to what he said to newsbeast.gr, their logo has the circle that symbolizes the square of Omonia, the "l" that symbolizes the "lovers" from the name of the group, while as an aesthetic it connects it with the sign of peace but also with the sign of anarchy as, as the members of the group say, the square is a place with special and often its own rules that do not go with those of the rest of the center.
For them, Omonia is something anarchic in terms of the contradictions of both the world that crosses it and the situations around it.
And despite the fact that the members of the group live or work around the center of Athens and are realistic, they see all the bad things that each of us sees that crosses it, they have decided to turn away from the obvious. After all, as they state, the goal is to generate emotion in the visitor of the exhibition. Let the people understand that there is the other side of the city.
Admission to the exhibition is free and the hours are daily from 17:00 to 21:00 except for this first day of the opening on Friday 22 of the month which will start at 18:30.
The "Omonia Lovers" team consists of: Stratos Neslehanidis, Vangelis Gravaritis, Alexandros Soultos, Nikos Sotiropoulos, Michail Tsavidis, Nikos Maliakos, George Kapsalakis and Nikos Tas.
