Therino Sinema: The Story of Greece's Open-Air Cinemas

Somewhere in Athens tonight, in a walled garden between two apartment blocks, a few dozen people will sit down in canvas chairs at nine o'clock. A projector will start. Above the screen there will be no ceiling, only the sky, and by the time the film ends the jasmine on the wall will be doing most of the work on the air.

This is the therino — the summer cinema — and Greece has been doing it for well over a century.

It started before most of us think

Outdoor screenings were happening in Athens from around 1900, in Syntagma Square, when moving pictures were still a curiosity rather than an industry. The oldest survivor, the Aigli in the Zappeion gardens, is generally dated to 1910 and is still running today. That is not a revival or a heritage re-creation. It is the same garden, still showing films, well over a hundred summers later.

The form really took hold in the decades after the war. Buildings were hot, air conditioning was rare or non-existent, and land inside the city was full of odd corners — courtyards, vacant plots, flat roofs — that could hold a screen, a projector and a hundred chairs for very little money. A summer cinema was cheap to open and cheap to attend, and for a generation it was simply what you did in the evening.

The usual account is that television, then multiplexes, then everything else took the numbers down hard from the 1970s onwards, and many of the old therina were sold as building plots. What is remarkable is not the decline but the floor it found. Around sixty-five open-air cinemas still operate in Athens today. Not sixty-five in Greece. Sixty-five in one city.

The rules, such as they are

A few things about a Greek summer cinema surprise people the first time.

Films are subtitled, never dubbed. This is close to a national principle. Apart from children's films, you hear the original soundtrack and read along the bottom. It is one of the reasons Greek audiences are so comfortable with foreign cinema, and it means an English-language film plays exactly as it was made.

There are usually two showings, around nine and around eleven. The second is the one to take seriously. It starts late enough that the heat has properly gone and the city has quietened, and the audience for it tends to be locals rather than visitors.

The food is not popcorn. Or not only. Depending on where you are you might find pizza made on the premises, skewers, pastries, a proper bar doing cocktails and wine. The idea that cinema food means a paper bucket is an American one that never quite landed here.

The season is weather, not calendar. Broadly late May to early October, but a therino opens when the evenings are warm enough and closes when they are not. Nobody publishes a fixed date because nobody can.

Nobody is quiet. People arrive late, greet each other across the rows, get up for another drink. It is closer to a long dinner with a film happening than to the reverent hush of an indoor screen. If that sounds like a criticism, it is not — it is the entire point.

Why it works, and why it keeps working

There is a practical answer and a better one.

The practical answer is climate. For four months of the year the most comfortable place in Greece after dark is outside, and any entertainment that acknowledges this beats one that fights it.

The better answer is that watching a film outdoors changes what a film is. Indoors, the room disappears and you are alone with the screen. Outdoors, you never quite lose the world. A moth crosses the beam. Someone's scooter goes past. The temperature drops a degree in the second hour and you reach for the blanket. The film is not competing with any of that; it is sitting inside it. People remember outdoor screenings years later and usually cannot tell you the plot — they can tell you the air, the company, what they were drinking.

Which is where we came in

Starlight Cinema Crete is not an imported idea. It is the private version of something Greece has been doing for a hundred and twenty years — the same screen under the same sky, except in your garden rather than a courtyard in Kolonaki, with your film and your people and nobody arriving late but you.

If you are on the island and there is a therino near you, go. Genuinely. It is one of the best evenings Greece offers and it costs almost nothing. Then, on another night, stay in and let us build one on your terrace — we arrive in the afternoon, set the screen and sound up wherever the view is best, style the seating, stay through the evening, and take the whole thing away before morning.

We have written elsewhere about romantic evenings in Crete beyond the restaurant table, and about Rethymno's old town after dark if you want the public version first.

And when you want the private one, tell us your dates.