Greece: 1 scheme to know about before you drive in.
Athens has one driving restriction on our books: the Ωράριο κυκλοφορίας και τροφοδοσίας φορτηγών στον Δήμο Αθηναίων (απόφαση… (heavy vehicle ban). What is a heavy vehicle ban?
Sources last read on 2026-09-21, from the authorities' own pages. The next scheduled check is 2026-12-20.
Athens sorts delivery vehicles by weight and by the clock, and it does it across the whole municipality rather than inside a drawn zone. Between 21:00 and 09:00 the next morning, any type of goods vehicle may circulate and supply the city's businesses, supermarkets and other shops.
For the rest of the day — 09:00 to 21:00, every day of the week — that resupply may only be carried out by vehicles whose gross weight is up to two tonnes. There is no charge, no sticker, no permit to buy and no exhaust class that changes the answer: the Regional Council of Attica wrote a clock and a weight, and nothing else.
If you are driving a car, none of it reaches you at any hour, and the same is true of a van being driven rather than used to supply a shop. Two carve-outs sit inside the city.
The supply of the fresh-fish shops of the Varvakios market is expressly taken out of the Athens prohibition, and the Commercial Triangle — the block bounded by Athinas, Plateia Omonoias, Stadiou, Plateia Syntagmatos and Mitropoleos — is governed for supply purposes not by this decision at all but by a 1997 joint ministerial decision that this one points at and does not reproduce.
Above those sit six exemptions that run through the whole instrument, of which one is about the vehicle rather than the errand: a purely electric vehicle of up to 2.5 tonnes gross is outside the restrictions. The decision is not seasonal and not annual, and that is the change that makes it publishable.
Its immediate predecessor was an annual instrument — decision 78/2021 fixed the hours «για το χρονικό διάστημα από ψήφισης της παρούσης έως και τις 31.12.2021» — whereas this one states that it runs from publication until a newer decision is issued. Two supplements in 2025 amended it without replacing it, which is how we know it is still the operative text.