Thousands of fans packed Pier B2 of the Thessaloniki port on Friday night as the Greek hip-hop group Imiskoumpria marked 30 years since the start of their career with a concert that turned into a city-wide celebration.
People of different ages filled the venue from early in the evening, organisers said, with some fans having grown up listening to the group in the 1990s and others discovering the songs years later. For more than two and a half hours, the band, made up of Dimitris Mentzelos, Mithridatis and Prytanis, performed in front of the Thessaloniki crowd they first won over decades earlier.
Crowd takes over the vocals
At several points during the show, the band barely needed to sing at all because the audience carried the lyrics instead. Thousands of voices sang the verses of songs that have become tied to an entire era, with the group's trademark humour, satire and catchphrases echoing back from the crowd.
The concert felt less like a performance watched by an audience and more like a single event shared between the band and the fans, with many moments blurring the line between the two. As the night drew toward its close, the crowd made clear it was not ready for it to end, chanting for the band to keep playing and refusing to leave the port.
A tribute to Giorgos Mazonakis
During the anniversary show, Imiskoumpria paused to honour the singer Giorgos Mazonakis, who died on Wednesday at the age of 54 following a cardiac arrest. His death prompted an outpouring of grief among artists and fans across Greece. Mazonakis was a well-known figure in Greek pop and laiko music.
Band members called out his name three times during the set. Each time, the audience responded by singing "Ena Keno" ("A Void"), one of his best-known songs, turning part of the anniversary concert into a spontaneous collective farewell. The band later addressed their own goodbye to Mazonakis from the stage, offering a farewell that translates as "until we meet again" along with the English tribute "RIP," amid an emotional atmosphere in the crowd.
From a sold-out theatre to a packed port
The scale of Friday's crowd had been building for months. The anniversary show was originally scheduled to take place at the Theatro Gis in Thessaloniki, but tickets sold out almost immediately, prompting organisers to move the "30 Years of Hits" Anniversary Live concert to the larger Pier B2 venue at the port.
The size of the crowd on the night of 11 September showed why the move was necessary. The concert had more of the feel of a reunion than a standard tour stop, and it came after Imiskoumpria had already played two sold-out anniversary shows in Athens.
Thirty years since the first gold record
The timing of the reunion was not incidental. The year 2026 marks 30 years since the release of "30 Years of Hits," the group's debut album, which came out in 1996 and became the first gold record in Greek hip-hop.
Three decades later, the clearest evidence of the mark that album and the band's career left was not found in any sales figures or chart positions. It was found in front of the stage, among fans who knew every word, groups of friends singing arm in arm, older fans reliving the years when they first heard the songs, and younger fans who may not have even been born when Imiskoumpria started out.
A night that did not want to end
More than two and a half hours after the show began, the energy in the crowd had barely dropped. Songs followed one another, lines from the stage were met instantly by the crowd below, and the Thessaloniki port had turned into a vast open-air party.
Eventually the show had to end, but the audience made its feelings known, repeatedly chanting for the band to keep going. That call for more may have been the fitting finale for a concert marking 30 years of Imiskoumpria, needing no anniversary speeches to show what the band had left behind, just a packed pier and thousands of voices singing the same lyrics, calling for more, again and again.
