This shopping street in Greece used to be the 10th most expensive in the world - take a look at it now
I started on the western end of the street, near my hotel — it doesn't look like this was ever part of the prime retail space.
There's a lot of graffiti.
The places at this end of the road certainly weren't selling high-end goods.
But the bars and restaurants on the side-streets seem like they're still doing OK.
Some places are shuttered, and look like they have been closed for quite a long time.
This is a typical view of one of the side-streets without any shops or places to eat on it.
Monastiraki, a square on the site of a 10th-century monastery, had a great view of the Acropolis.
Even further up the street, towards the prime shopping area, there were buildings that looked like they'd been left alone for a long time.
Some looked like they had some sort of renovation work being done at some point, but there wasn't much sign of that when I visited.
I passed a small ATM queue of Greeks trying to reclaim their deposits too.
The Church of Panagia Kapnikarea is in the middle of the street — it's an intact Byzantine church built in 1050, one of Athens' oldest.
There was clearly more activity further up the road, but some stores were still shuttered.
The Foot Locker Joe Weisenthal got shooed away from in 2012 — there were a few customers.
Sprider, a chain of Greek value fashion stores, closed down in 2013. Nothing had replaced this large outlet since then.
This Adidas store looked a little more full than when Joe Weisenthal visited, but not much more full.
At the very end of the street you can see Syntagma Square, the focal point of the protests (and sometimes riots) of the last six years.
Plenty of the stores remaining at the most eastern part of the street would be recognisable to people from other countries.
A Greek business lobby group says that without a bailout deal, 59 businesses are closing each day in the country.
Back in 2007, it cost about $450 per square foot to rent retail space on Ermou, according to Cushman and Wakefield.
In their latest report Ermou costs just $253 per square foot, a decline of nearly 50% from its heyday.
Even at this end of the street, some store fronts were pretty much abandoned.
On a side-street at the very eastern end of Ermou, I saw cleaners protesting against low wages.
Now that you've seen this ...
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