On Lisbon. Part One

How does your view of a city change when you go from one you know deeply to one you're only visiting for a few days?

I started in Athens, the city where I was born and raised, and then began getting to know Berlin. Over time, this initially foreign city became my second home.

Building that relationship took time and energy. For a long time, I believed a few-day tourist visit to another city could only give you something fragmentary and superficial. What can you really observe in such a short time?

Eventually, I began to understand that cities you're just visiting don't need to be understood the same way as a city where you actually live. What could I learn about a city through a short visit? With that question in mind, I recently went to Lisbon.

What immediately stood out had a strongly comparative quality: observing how people live in Lisbon while indirectly reconsidering life in the two cities I know well - by noticing things in the urban environment that are usually so taken for granted they go unnoticed.

One example is language. Signs, storefronts, advertisements all look familiar, but through a different arrangement of the Latin alphabet. Something so obvious suddenly became foreign. For foreigners, even just seeing the Greek alphabet is probably an attraction in itself.

The same goes for Lisbon's sidewalks. They're so distinctive that they force you to notice them and reconsider the importance of small-scale details in urban space.

Or the food culture: it's hard to miss how the Portuguese relate to pastel de nata and espresso—a daily, social ritual, probably much like how our relationship with freddo appears to visitors.

I also saw stereotypes like the tram 28 or the "Cristiano Ronaldo" brand functioning as exportable symbols of collective identity. Even cork has been woven so deeply into everyday life that it's used as seating in the metro, a choice with real symbolic weight. What are the corresponding small symbols of contemporary Greek identity?

At the same time, Lisbon's historical legacy and geography are constantly present. You can see similarities with other Mediterranean countries and the culture of the sea.

But it's also clear this isn't just a contemporary country on Europe's periphery—it's a former empire, with monuments and spatial traces from the age of exploration (or conquest) that inevitably resurface in today's conversations about the global south. A comparison that naturally leads to Berlin and its relationship with the 20th century, or Athens and its relationship with antiquity.

Yet among all these observations, the tiles on building facades really stand out—such a distinctive feature that you find yourself stopping to look at them again and again, every few feet.

As does the particular way buildings relate to time, materiality, and color: materials that age but invite you to touch them, colors both vibrant and faded that together create atmosphere and character.