Last month, as part of the first British Council E.U. Diversity Week, British Council Greece organised two Diversity Walks in Athens and Thessaloniki. British Council staff in Athens discovered the new multicultural face of Athens by taking a walk around the Psyrri area. The walk was organised by Alternative Tours of Athens (ATA). Participants had the opportunity to see sites of informal mosques, visit areas with high concentrations of shops and other businesses catering to the Pakistani and Bangladeshi communities, look at patterns of migration over the course of a century and enjoy some wonderful street art by Greek and foreign artists! The purpose was to raise awareness around ethnicity issues through familiarisation with a lively ethnic community.
The focus of the Thessaloniki diversity walk was the Muslim and Jewish communities of the past. The purpose was to raise awareness around ethnicity and religion, through promoting the value of ethnic communities of the past and the way these have contributed to the city’s life and development. Our staff in the Thessaloniki office was joined by representatives from the Municipality of Thessaloniki, European Youth Capital 2014 and EUNIC Greece (European Union National Institutes for Culture). This multicultural group took a walk around the city centre and – guided by Konstantinos Sfikas – explored the multicultural past of a city where people of diverse religious and ethnic backgrounds once lived harmoniously together!
