Opa!: The Word That Means Everything – And the Plate That Used to Go With It

There are evenings in a Greek taverna when no full sentence is needed. Someone raises a glass, the music swells, and suddenly the whole table shouts just one word: Opa! It means nothing – and everything at once. Joy, encouragement, "watch out!", "keep going!", sometimes even anger. Greeks shout it while dancing, while toasting, while watching football, even when something falls off a table. One word for every occasion, precisely because it never needs to mean just one thing.

That shout used to come with a sound of its own: the crash of a plate hitting the floor. Even Greeks don't fully agree on where the custom comes from. Some trace it to the "manges" of the 1930s rebetiko scene – men who, after an intense solo dance called the zeibekiko, couldn't put their emotion into words and instead sent a plate, a glass, or in extreme cases the whole table crashing to the ground. Not to show off, but out of sheer necessity. Others point to a far more mundane trigger: the 1960 film "Never on Sunday", after which plate smashing spread across Greece as a tourist spectacle – at its peak, reportedly over 100,000 plates a month were broken.

Today, real porcelain rarely gets thrown in actual Greek tavernas anymore – too expensive, too dangerous, and in many places no longer allowed at all. Anyone who still wants the experience usually gets plates made of plaster, fired specifically to be broken. What remains is the heart of the thing: the moment when joy gets too big for calm gestures – and a single word that is entirely enough to hold it.

No plates will be flying at your feet here (yet). But the word is always close at hand with us – especially on 29.09., when we celebrate our Drachmen Fest again: live music, prices like it's 1960, and guaranteed at least one Opa! along the way. Only 7 days left! And mark your calendars already: from 04.10. to 15.10. we're closed for our annual break, and from 16.10. we're back for you.