Athens Halloween Festival 2026: 18 Greek Comics, Three Nights, One Old Bus Depot

The Athens Halloween Festival ran Friday, October 30 to Sunday, November 1 at the Old OSY Bus Depot in Gazi, the Athens neighborhood that grew up around the city's old gasworks. It calls itself the first big Halloween festival in Greece, which is a little like being the first big Thanksgiving in Portugal. Nobody is going to argue with you, because nobody else showed up. The festival's site says last year's edition drew 18,000 visitors, and this year it moved from the Kypseli Municipal Market to the bus depot. I can't think of a better home for a horror festival than a bus garage. Anybody who has ever waited for a city bus already knows the dread.

Comedy was one slice of a long program. There was a horror museum and escape room, a Halloween market, pumpkin carving at 16 euros, workshops, film screenings, a Fantasy Choir, dance shows and a live Dungeons & Dragons game. General entry was 5 euros early bird. Stand-up was 15 euros a night through more.com, in the festival's main hall. So for one euro less than carving a pumpkin, you could watch six people carve themselves. I know which one I'd pick. The pumpkin has never once asked me where I'm from.

Each night had its own lineup of six, eighteen comics in all. Friday at 7:30 p.m. put up Ilias Fountoulis, Giannis Roussos, Sofia Kliani, Odysseas Mavrommatis, Rouli Bourada and Angelos Spiliopoulos. Saturday, Halloween itself, started at 7 with a bill that included Ira Katsouda, Kostas Kryos, Aristotelis Rigas, Savvoula Oikonomou and Katerina Vrana. Sunday at 8 closed it out with Alexandros Charizanis, Andreas Paspatis, Paris Roupos, Eirini Xygaki, Aristeidis Psylliakos and Zana Maliki. The press release said the three lineups were built just for this year. People have been paying to watch strangers die on a stage since the Greeks invented the stage, so in a sense this was the home crowd.

How did it go? Heckle couldn't find out, and we looked. Every story we found, in Ethnos, Alter-info, Athina 98.4 and ERT Open, ran before the doors opened, and they read nearly the same, the way press releases do once four newsrooms have taken turns with them. There's no review, no recap, no clip, no sellout notice and no head count for the comedy shows. That isn't a verdict on the comics. In my experience, a show nobody writes about is usually a show where nothing went wrong. Critics only turn up for the car crash, and they bring their own flashlights.

It was a slow week for festivals closing. The big ones are all still going: New York runs through November 15, and Harrogate in England still has Richard Ayoade and Harry Enfield on the calendar later this month. So the honor of Heckle's attention fell to a bus depot in Gazi. The festival can put that on next year's poster if it likes. We won't charge.

For comics, the news is short. The festival's site names no organizer, has no performer submissions page and publishes no pay terms. The only application form on the site is for exhibitors, small creative businesses who want a stall at the market. So if you make skull-shaped candles, there's a form for you. If you make jokes, you wait to be asked. To be fair to Athens, nobody had to sign a contract promising not to mention a royal family, which puts it ahead of at least one festival that cost a great deal more to attend.

Heckle's verdict: if you're a working Greek comic, this is a fine paying-crowd gig in a city that clearly turns out, and the way in is through the local scene, not a form. If you're anybody else, it's a nice weekend in Athens, and the comedy will be in Greek, which is only a problem if you need to understand it to laugh, and most festival crowds don't.

A festival that charges 5 euros to be frightened and 15 to be amused has worked out what show business learned long ago. People will pay a little to be scared, but they'll pay three times as much to be told everything is going to be fine.