Tip of the day – Athens Pride

• June 12, 2025

20 years Athens Pride | Metrame –  We Count | Saturday  14 June 2025, Syntagma square, Parade 19.00

Athens Pride is more than just a celebration—it’s a vibrant, powerful movement for visibility, equality, and love. Held every June in the heart of the Greek capital, Athens Pride brings together thousands of people from all walks of life to march, dance, and stand united for LGBTQ+ rights. With its colorful parades, open-air concerts, art installations, and inclusive community events, it’s a highlight of the summer that turns the city into a beacon of pride and solidarity. ️‍

20 Years of Athens Pride
We count joys

Moments of pride, liberation and empowerment at our first pride. The joy of the first “YES”. The joy of acceptance and support of our own people. We count kisses, we count love, we count all the “I love you’s” we feared would never be given to us.

We count losses

Sisters, brothers and sisters we lost to the violence and hatred that targeted us and continues to target us in dark alleys, on public transportation, in crowded squares, in our own homes. We count loved ones lost to state indifference in the AIDS epidemic, our own people who did not fit into the stifling framework of patriarchy and normality. The women who were publicly vilified in 2012 as HIV-positive – an institutional decision of vilification and stigmatization – that cost human lives. Zack/Zackie, Ana, Diona and many more names we may never know.

We count victories

The civil union pact, legal gender identity recognition, same-sex marriage, the Intersex Minors Protection Act, the growing visibility and representation of LGBTQI+ people in institutions and the public sphere.

Counting disappointments

Moments of disappointment from the state, the education system, the media, our own people, people we met for the first time, people we don’t even know, but they have already stigmatized us. From the justice system, which appears to be weak and inadequate to unwilling to assign the corresponding responsibilities in cases of structural violence and state negligence – such as the shipwreck in Pylos and the tragedy of Tempi – the constant lack of accountability and trust in the institutions is highlighted.

We count struggles

Struggles for visibility, for acceptance of the LGBTQI+ community that we inherited with honor from earlier generations who fought for dignity and equality. From the Stonewall uprising in June 1969, the first major trans, gay, lesbian and transgender demonstrations and the first prides on Strafis Hill and Areos Field in the 80s and 90s, the weddings in Tilos, the first prides in the Greek countryside, to the struggles for inclusion and acceptance in institutions and society.

Now, more than ever, the global context shows us that no acquis can be taken for granted. Instead, our rights and our very existence are being challenged every day. The rise of the far right and the normalisation of hate speech in political and media discourse are a threat to all of us. The exclusion of LGBTQI+ refugees/refugees and migrants is intensifying, leading to multiple exclusions with racist, sexist, homophobic and/or transphobic motives.

For all this, our presence in the public space will continue to be our undeniable right, a historical duty and an act of resistance against a public discourse of abuse that seeks to erase us.

The struggles for equality are ongoing and unabated. We are and will be here to keep giving them.

For the twentieth year, on Saturday 14 June, we rendezvous in Constitution Square carrying with us the countless moments of joy and sorrow, victories and losses that have marked us and joining hundreds of thousands of people in this huge day of celebration, reclaiming and remembrance.

20 years… and counting!

Check all the Athens Pride events here!