4 September 2026
The price was printed in a newspaper, in an archive open to everyone, and nobody had gone looking for it.
Where we were stuck
The series starts in 1976, but for a whole stretch there was not a single price. The figure we published for those years came from interpolating between two distant price-control orders, 1977 and 1989.
The ELSTAT monthly bulletins had been tried and came up empty: the retail price table carries bread, poultry and oil, no prepared food. The government gazette had been tried too, with no result.
The route that worked
The National Library digital newspaper archive is free, needs no account, and has full-text character recognition. It holds Makedonia, Rizospastis, Eleftheria, Embros and Tachydromos.
The word "souvlaki", restricted to the gap years, returns two hundred and sixteen articles. The first two we opened both carried a price.
What they said
Makedonia, 24 October 1976, page 9. A ministry of commerce order sets the gyro wrap at 7.5 drachmas with pita and seasoning. And the same text records the price already prevailing in the shops: eight drachmas. The series takes the market price, because the document states it.
Rizospastis, 17 June 1978, page 3. A price-control order sets the doner wrap at 10 drachmas with pita. It is the first documented wrap price inside the years that had no source at all, and it breaks the run in two. The project's largest gap fell from 11 years to 10, 1979-1988, and documented years went from 16 to 18.
Two constants that were assumptions
The first is the factor that turns a regulated ceiling into a market price. We had measured it once, from a 1989 report, at the moment price control was lifted and prices typically overshoot: 1.154. The 1976 text measures it inside the price-control era and in Athens: 1.067. We keep the mean of the two, 1.11.
The second is the skewer-to-wrap ratio, pinned at 0.60 with no source. Both documents print the two prices side by side: 0.93 in 1976 and 0.85 in 1978. That makes sense, because back then the wrap was nearly the same thing plus the pita, while today it carries fries and a far bigger portion.
The unexpected part
With the new factor, the 1977 Chania order carried forward to 1989 on headline inflation alone lands half a percent from the documented price. Before, it missed by three and a half.
Nothing was tuned to produce that. The improvement came from an independent document we were not looking at for this reason.
What is left
10 years, 1979-1988, still with no source at all. The remaining two hundred and thirteen articles in the archive were not mined: reading is scan by scan, by eye.
1977, 1979, 1980 and 1981 hold dozens of hits each. If anyone wants to help, the route is open and free.
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-dyo-arthra, last updated 2026-08-31.