Can you draw Greece with tavernas?

1 · The mapGreece, drawn with tavernas

For the UK I had one official register with every pub in it. For Greece there isn't one, so I used OpenStreetMap, the free map that anyone can edit. I downloaded every restaurant, café and bar in Greece, 33,951 places, and sorted them into tavernas, kafeneia and ouzeri or tsipouradika, using their names and tags.

The coast and the islands light up straight away. Crete, Corfu, the Cyclades and Rhodes almost draw themselves. The mountains and much of the north are very dark, though. At first I thought that's just where people live, but then I checked the official numbers.

2 · A map of what?Is this a map of tavernas, or of tourists?

ELSTAT, the Greek statistics authority, counts every restaurant and every bar or café business in each area. When I compared those counts with OpenStreetMap, I found out that the map only has 46% of them. And it's very uneven.

In Rethymno, Lasithi, Kefalonia and the Dodecanese, OpenStreetMap has more than 80% of the places ELSTAT counts. In Pella, Xanthi and Imathia it has about one in ten. The places tourists visit get mapped by tourists, guides and businesses. The village kafeneio in Pella doesn't. So the dark areas on my map are partly real, and partly just not mapped.

3 · Finding the dataWhy this was so hard

I wanted to make a point about this, because the difference with the UK is huge. For the pubs I downloaded one file per council from one website, and every pub had a name, an address and coordinates. For Greece, this is what I found.

None of this means the data doesn't exist. Every taverna has a licence from its municipality and a tax registration. It just isn't published in one place in a form anyone can use.

4 · The crisisFewer places, more people working in them

Then I wondered if the crisis years show up in the data, like 2008 did for the UK pubs. ELSTAT's national series starts in 2011, already a few years into the crisis. Since then, bars and cafés (which includes kafeneia) went from 40,392 to 34,338, and restaurants (which includes tavernas) from 46,734 to 39,562. That's about 15% fewer of each.

The number of people working in bars and cafés more than doubled in the same years, from about 95,000 to 207,000. Some of that is probably more staff being declared officially. Still, it's the same thing I found for the UK pubs: fewer places, but bigger ones.

Between 2016 and 2023 the change was very different from place to place. Attica gained 13% more bars and cafés, while almost everywhere else lost some. The north lost the most: Kilkis, Evros and Serres lost about a quarter. That fits with the villages emptying out and the last kafeneio closing.

5 · NamesThere's no Red Lion in Greece

The fun part was going through the names again. In the UK, one pub in a hundred is a Red Lion. In Greece, the names are much more varied. The most common is Panorama, with only 38. After that come the seashore (Akrogiali), the owner (Nikos, Kostas, Maria) and, of course, Zorbas.

Many names describe where you're sitting: the view, the sea, the olive tree or the plane tree in the square. I counted 162 named after the view or the sea, 85 after a tree and 83 after gods and myths. Fifty-two are named after a granny, a mum or a grandad.

6 · Greece and the UKOne for every 300 people

ELSTAT counts one bar or café business for every 303 people in Greece. In the UK there's one pub or bar for every 1,827 people. The two aren't measured in the same way, because the Greek figure includes cafés and counts businesses, not premises. Still, Greece has almost as many bars and cafés as the UK has pubs, with a sixth of the population.