7 September 2026
The index says a pita gyros in Thessaloniki costs 19% more than in Athens. We had an explanation for that, resting on eighteen photographed menus. It turned out the answer had been staring out of our own data four hundred and seventy-two times.
The trick with the portion
Every gyros shop sells exactly the same meat two ways: wrapped in a pita, and as a portion with chips. Compare the two INSIDE one menu and everything that makes city comparisons hard disappears. The rent is the same for both plates. So is the wage, the VAT, the cost of the meat.
What is left is a single piece of information: how much of a portion this shop puts inside the pita.
The explanation was already on our pages, but it rested on 18 price pairs, gathered one at a time from photographed menus across two decades. They gave Thessaloniki 0.41 and Athens 0.33.
The answer was already here
One of the three platforms we read every month also quotes a portion price, in the same shop on the same day. The test was already sitting in our data 472 times, and nobody had asked it.
The result does not contradict the menus, it enlarges them: Athens 0.381 across 137 shops, Thessaloniki 0.527 across 50. The Thessaloniki wrap holds 38% more of a portion.
And it costs 19% more. Divide the two and the premium turns around: per unit of content Thessaloniki comes out at 0.86, that is 14% CHEAPER than Athens.
The 2014 test, twelve years on
Our page cited as its cleanest case two menus from one year: Thessaloniki 2014, wrap 2.70 and portion 6.90; Ioannina 2014, wrap 2.10 and portion 6.50. The portion almost identical, the wrap 29% dearer.
Two menus are two menus. The very same test, across the 65 shops of those same two cities in 2026: the portion differs by 2%, the wrap by 19%.
Twelve years later, by a completely different method, the same shape. That is not proof, but it is as close to replication as price data will give you.
And then something we were not looking for
We put all 17 cities with enough sample on one chart: portion price across, the share the wrap holds up. The correlation is -0.81.
Look at what spreads and what does not. The PORTION runs from 7.55 € in Larisa to 14.50 € in Santorini, very nearly doubling. The WRAP in those same cities moves by only 32%.
The reading is that the wrap's price is anchored near a national norm while the portion follows local costs freely. Where costs rise, the wrap does not get dearer. It gets smaller.
Why it matters
The index measures how many pita gyros a wage buys. If the wrap is not the same thing from city to city, the geographic comparison loses its meaning, and the worst part is that you cannot tell: the numbers come out looking fine.
That is why Thessaloniki's factor stays in the series as a price, with the explanation beside it rather than inside it. The per-content adjustment enters NO observation, because it assumes the portion is a comparable product in both cities. The within-shop ratio does not need that; the between-city comparison does.
So we keep it as an explanation and not as a correction. The difference between those two is the whole job.
See the same numbers live in the interactive dashboard.
The figures in this article are not written by hand: they are computed from the data series and change when it does. Prices and wages up to August 2026. Dataset version 2026.09-pita-i-santouits, last updated 2026-09-07.