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Little Homelands of Diversity

Maro Kouri

Athens has become one of Europe’s main entry points for migrants, transforming neighbourhoods and reshaping the city’s social fabric. In Little Homelands of Diversity and Places of Prayers, Maro Kouri documents the daily lives of migrant communities since the early 2000s, exploring their struggles and the ways they maintain ties to their countries of origin. Her photographs focus on downtown districts where foreign-born residents make up more than half the population, revealing an urban environment where multiple cultures coexist.

Kouri captures moments inside places of worship, family gatherings, and community celebrations, portraying Athens as a city where diverse identities meet, overlap, and adapt to one another.

“Where our parents, in the 1970s and ’80s, once closed their shops and took us out at night for dinner with guitars and bouzouki, today the old shops, taverns, industrial spaces, and warehouses pulse with life as places of prayer, and the streets overflow with gospel bands, Ethiopian choirs, Muslim prayers, and Hindu hymns — the faithful gathering in spontaneous, sacred moments,” Kouri says.

Where apartment blocks once housed migrants from rural Greece, today families from Africa, Asia, and the former Eastern Bloc have made these buildings their homes. The Greek author Antonis Samarakis, who once wrote “rooftops were never so close and hearts never so far apart,” might smile today seeing African families celebrating together, for example, a baby’s first bath.