What we do not know

What has already been searched

So the same work is not repeated, and so nobody sends a source that has already been ruled out.

• Czech press, ELIA menus and GAK fonds

  Partial2026-09-15

  New independent Athens-2000 evidence from iDNES, as a guide minimum rather than an annual mean. The Fabbri republication is not counted twice. ELIA: 83 records, 37 undated, 19 with visual review of linked images. No digitised documents were found in the two GAK fonds. No new anchor or numerical change.

  • What the new price establishes
  • Sources, catalogues and review limits (JSON)

• Polish press and Order 11/1985

  Partial2026-09-15

  Six new local price claims for 2000–2001 from three sources. Order 11/1985 was retrieved and concerns other dishes. No change to the national proxy or closure of earlier year gaps.

  • Original Crete price report, 2000
  • What Order 11/1985 contains

• Multilingual travel accounts: Crete prices, 2001

  Partial2026-09-15

  5 gyro-wrap claims from 2 sources, separating trip and publication dates. One two-town price claim is not counted as two shops. Local reports inform the review of the reference price without automatically changing the series or closing earlier gaps. Details on the year page.

  • Prices, sources and Index use
  • Source observations and fingerprints (JSON)

• Targeted historical issue review and Order 23/1981

  Partial2026-09-15

  Order 23/1981 newly retrieved, without a pita-wrap price. The December 1980 source is the same already registered PDF. Additional checks distinguish complete originals, visual review and text-only discovery. No anchor was added and the series gaps remain.

  • Original and interpretation
  • Findings and research target status (JSON)

• Historical menus, a travel account and a Messinia regulation

  Partial2026-09-15

  4 new menus at the same Thessaloniki address separate base prices and spread charges. The existing Athens 1999 source was retrieved in full, with serving format still unresolved. The 1988 order distinguishes cooked gyro from raw-pork skewers and specifies added bread cost without an absolute price. The Fagoto menu has uncertain dating. No national anchor was added. Years still without an accepted anchor: 1979, 1981, 1982, 1985, 1986, 1987, 1988.

  • Findings, limitations and original sources (JSON)
  • Messinia regulation, 1988
  • Athens travel account, 1999
  • Menus from 2009
  • Menus from 2010

• 1985–1988 research: Patris, Simaia and The Athenian

  Nothing2026-09-14

  OCR was screened for 7 issues, totalling 38 pages, with visual checks recorded separately. Relevant matches concern recruitment, business or equipment sales and menus of other products without prices. No new price or anchor was added. Access failures are recorded separately: an HTML redirect or a failed retrieval does not mean an empty issue. The detailed register provides original URLs, hashes, pages and unresolved dates. Screening selected OCR is not an exhaustive archive search.

  • Detailed research register and original sources (JSON)
  • Patris, 18 December 1986, page 3: separate advertisements

• Patris: dated advertisements and review of the November 1988 hypothesis

  Partial2026-09-14

  The 1987 front pages and advertisements were visually verified. The former Manolis shop at 12 Pediados Street names gyro in pita without a price. Apollonia tavern prices pork souvlaki without a clear serving unit or mention of pita. The advertisements cannot be combined into one price. Searching the digitised text of selected November 1988 issues did not date the undated clipping. No new Index price was added; OCR screening does not exclude relevant articles in unrecognised text.

  • Patris, 28 May 1987, page 4: Manolis (PDF)
  • Patris, 8 July 1987, page 6: Apollonia (PDF)

• Travel guides and diaries on archive.org, through the public full-text search

  Closed years2026-09-04

  Correction on 14 September 2026 to the original entry: the exchange ratio does not verify the year. The shared source review now establishes: Grivetti's narrative and expense ledger agree on 35 GRD for one sandwich purchase. They describe the same purchase, not two independent observations. The series retains this single observation. The purchase date, 26 June 1984, was read in the published journal pages. Neither the book's 2015 publication nor the drachma/dollar ratio is used to date the purchase. The narrative places the purchase in Athens' Plaka/Monastiraki, without a shop name. A single central-Athens purchase is not a national sample. A bread sandwich is described, ordered without the usual onions and tomatoes. Pita, meat type, gyro and cooked weight are unspecified. Matching it to a gyro pita remains conditional. The 1985 Let's Go edition remains comparison material requiring verification. Publication year does not automatically imply previous-year fieldwork, and the excerpt does not separate skewers from pita. It creates no 1985 anchor. The earlier search also recorded travel guides for 1995–2001, with unresolved recycled prices, product definitions and fieldwork dates. Verifying one purchase does not certify the other records. Borrowing requirements and restricted access were not circumvented.

  • Shared source, date and product review (JSON)
  • Grivetti journal: original preview

• The Hellenic Parliament digital repository and full-text search of the government gazette

  Nothing2026-09-04

  Two official routes, both empty of prices. The Parliament repository has full-text OCR and is reachable programmatically (DSpace: discover/search, then the TEXT bundle). The word “souvlaki” returns 22 items, including sittings from 1975, 1977, 1978, 1979, 1980, 1982, 1985 and 1995. The text of all eleven was pulled: NO PRICE. Every mention is rhetorical, from “who will assure us that the souvlaki our children eat is not undermining their health” to the souvlaki stalls outside the Polytechnic. At the National Printing House, full-text search returns 512 hits for “souvlaki”, but the oldest is gazette B 314/1992: the text index does not reach before 1992, and almost every hit is a company name. The price-control orders of 1984-1988 are not searchable by word.

• A second pass over the National Library archive, scored rather than read at random

  Closed years2026-09-04

  Correction on 14 September 2026: the old inference of a full-year 1979 freeze from the May order is withdrawn. The later June report describes an increase for doner in pita. The year remains interpolated without an accepted standalone anchor; the numerical series correction has already been applied and is not repeated here. The first pass read scans by eye and stopped at the easy ones. This time 689 articles from 1976-1983 were collected from nine search terms and scored straight from the OCR, without opening a single scan. THE TRICK WAS THE NEGATIVE WEIGHTS: "FOR SALE" next to "GRILL HOUSE" is a classified ad for a shop, and "CONFISCATED" is a price-control raid, which never prints a price. With positive weights only, the already-known 1983 find ranked 58th. With the negative ones, the two already-confirmed finds came out FIRST AND THIRD of 689, so the ranking was validated against known answers before being used for new ones. WHAT WAS FOUND: (a) Rizospastis 14 Aug 1983 p. 9, a FREE MARKET PRICE inside the gap: "the kebab-type souvlaki sells for 2 drachmas more, that is 30 drachmas", with the previous level of 28 GRD following from the same sentence. The project's longest gap was cut in two and fell from ten years to five. (b) Makedonia 18 May 1979 p. 1, two price-control orders that raise the catering basket by 22 to 50% while stating that souvlaki prices "remain unchanged". It did not become an anchor because it gives no level, but it went into the limitations: it documents that the sector index and the item can part ways. OPENED AND EMPTY: Makedonia 2 Jun 1977 p. 1 (a food-safety raid on a souvlaki workshop, no price, though it does document the word "doner" as early as 1977), Makedonia 4 Jun 1981 p. 9 (a department-store fire, the drachma figures were insurance), Rizospastis 14 Jan 1983 p. 9 (profiteering in cars, feta, milk and coffee).

  • Previously published series correction and prior results (JSON)

• The Rizospastis online archive (rizospastis.gr), full text from 1995

  Closed years2026-09-04

  The route for the years the National Library archive does not reach, since it stops in 1983. Free, with a snippet beside every result, so hundreds of articles can be sifted without opening any. 1,796 items were collected from ten search terms and the FULL text of the 868 falling in 1996-2006 was downloaded. ONE CLEAN PRICE: 8 Jan 2002, the paper's own market survey, "souvlaki saw increases of up to 46%, from 350 drachmas to 1.5 euro", repeated on 13 Jan 2002 where it is explicitly credited to a "mini survey" by the paper. The source's own arithmetic checks out: EUR 1.50 is 511 GRD, exactly 46% above 350. WHAT CHANGED: until now 2002 carried the same EUR 1.17 as 2001 and was declared documented, so the series stated that the euro changeover left the price untouched. That was not a measurement: EUR 1.17 is the conversion of the campaign's 399 GRD, a 2001 price written in euros. 2002 became an estimate with a documented 1.17-1.50 range and a central value from the official sector index. AND ONE FABRICATED URL: the euro2002 source pointed at story.do?id=1234567, which is not an article. The real report was located (4 Jan 2002, p. 12) and a check now forbids such identifiers in citations.

• Greek food-ordering portals and consumer bodies on the Wayback Machine, 2000-2004

  Nothing2026-09-04

  If anyone published grill-house menus online back then, they would be here. They are not. e-food.gr is archived from October 2000, but in 2004 it was selling DVDs, X-Boxes and computers, not food. fagito.gr was a hosting provider's placeholder with no content. delivery.gr has a shop list only from 2004 and no menus. souvlaki.gr returned 403 as early as 2000. The ministry's paratiritirio.gr starts in August 2003 and keeps no product tables, while inka.gr and ekpizo.gr have no surviving price-survey pages. The route is treated as closed: 2000-2003 stays with the newspapers.

• National Library digital newspaper archive (Makedonia, Rizospastis, Eleftheria, Embros, Tachydromos)

  Closed years2026-09-03

  The route that worked. Free, no account, full-text OCR. Searching for "souvlaki" returns 216 articles inside the gap years. TWO PRICES WERE FOUND AND ADDED: (a) Makedonia 24 Oct 1976 p. 9, a ministerial order, gyro wrap with pita at a regulated 7.50 GRD, and in the same text the price already prevailing in the market, 8 GRD. (b) Rizospastis 17 Jun 1978 p. 3, a price-control order, doner wrap with pita at 10 GRD. 1978 breaks the eleven consecutive years with no source, which fall to ten. AND A THIRD THAT GIVES NO PRICE BUT TWO RULES: Rizospastis 9 Feb 1983 p. 9, minister Moraitis's order, a 37-40 g portion and prices tied to fresh pork. The rest were not mined: reading is scan by scan, by eye, and 1977, 1979, 1980 and 1981 still hold dozens of hits each.

• Period newspaper clipping, no masthead and no date (via X)

  Partial2026-09-03

  Correction on 14 September 2026 to the original record: the clipping has no newspaper name, date or page. The attribution to 1988 was our inference, not a verified date. Monday 7 November is compatible with more than one year. Similar prices and CPI calculations neither rule out the other years nor independently validate the model. The previous claim of an error below 1% and the outdated count of consecutive gaps are withdrawn. It remains a research lead outside the price anchors. Use requires the complete dated original, location and a clear product description.

• Search for the price-control order effective 7 Nov 1988 in the government gazette

  Nothing2026-09-03

  The increase in the clipping was a price-control act, so a primary text exists. It was not found. Order 14/1989 does not help: its second article repeals "all price-control orders issued up to and including 16 February 1989" without listing them, so it yields no number for 1988. And the National Printing House offers no open full-text search of 1988 series B issues: eservices.et.gr is a login-gated submission portal. The route stays open for archive research on site.

• ELSTAT digital library, Monthly Statistical Bulletins 1976-1998

  Nothing2026-09-02

  The Athens-Piraeus retail price table lists bread, poultry, olive oil, cheese, potatoes and sugar per kilo, monthly. No prepared food, no souvlaki. The route works and the issues download, but the item was never tracked.

• A forum post about 1993

  Rejected2026-09-02

  "Souvlaki cost 120 drachmas at worst." It does not even say whether it means a skewer or a wrap, which are different products at different prices. Not used: once such a figure is in, it no longer looks different from the solid ones.

• Two independent search rounds for 1978-1988 prices

  Nothing2026-09-01

  Not a single primary price. Searches mostly returned retrospective articles and, increasingly, our own index frozen at an old release.

• Laws that ratify ministerial decisions in an annex

  Closed years2026-09-02

  It worked. Two indexation decisions of 26.1.1990 survived because they were ratified in the annex to law 1914/1990, and together with law 1828/1989 they closed 1988 through 1991. For earlier years no such law was located.

• The tax-circular archive, 1976-1988

  Nothing2026-09-02

  Effectively empty before 1988: 1976 has a single entry and 1985 three. The 1988 and 1989 listings contain no circular carrying a scale.

• The Government Gazette archive

  Partial2026-09-02

  The search takes a year, an issue and a Gazette NUMBER, not content. Without the decision's number from elsewhere it does not help. Laws are findable, ministerial decisions are not.