Saturday 10 October 2026 · Galatsi, Athens
A hackathon in Athens for people who have never been to one.
You get put in a team of five strangers, build something for three hours, and show it. That is the whole event.
- When
- Sat 10 October 2026
12:00 to 18:00 - Cost
- Free
- Language
- English
- Bring
- A laptop and a charger
What actually happens
- 12:00
- Doors. You get a name tag and a chair. Nobody knows anybody yet.
- 13:00
- The draw. Names come out of a bowl, five at a time. Those five are your team, and you pick an idea together in the first ten minutes.
- 13:30
- Build. Three hours, any tool you like. AI coding tools are allowed and most teams use them.
- 16:30
- Demos. Four minutes per team, working or not.
- 18:00
- Done. Whatever you built is yours, MIT licensed by default.
Who it is for
People who can't code, mostly. Business and economics students, architecture, medicine, fine arts, humanities, first-year computer science. Erasmus students who arrived in September and know nobody. Anyone who has wanted to make a small thing exist and never had an afternoon and four other people to do it with.
About half of the room doesn't study computer science, and that is on purpose. A team of five programmers builds a login page. A team with a medical student, a designer and two people who have never opened a terminal builds something nobody expected.
If you do code, you are welcome, and you will probably end up being the one on your team who gets the thing to run.
Do I need to know how to code?
No. Somebody on your team will have written code before, and AI tools like ChatGPT, Claude, Cursor and Lovable will write most of it anyway. What a team actually needs for three hours is someone who can decide what to build, someone who can explain it, someone who can draw it, and someone who can test it and say "that's broken". Code is one job out of five.
What it isn't
It isn't a competition. There are no judges, no scores, no prizes. Nobody is pitching to investors. There is no sponsor logo and no application form. The big Athens hackathons, like AI Hackathon Greece at AUEB or the Greece-Türkiye Hackathon, are weekend-long competitions with selection rounds and cash prizes. This is the opposite: one afternoon, everyone gets in, and the only outcome is that something exists at 18:00 that didn't at 13:00.
It also isn't a class. Nobody teaches. You learn whatever your team happens to need in the moment, which is how most people learn anything.
Getting to Galatsi
Galatsi sits just north of the centre of Athens, above Kypseli. The Community Centre is at Vassou 5, Galatsi 111 46. It's a short bus ride from the centre; the stop and a walking route go in the Instagram group the week before.
Questions people ask
Can I come on my own?
That is how nearly everyone comes. You leave with a team.
Can I come with a friend?
Yes, but the bowl decides teams, so you will probably be on different ones. That is the point.
I'm under 18.
Ask us in the Discord first, before the day.
What if we don't finish?
You demo it anyway. Half the room shows something held together with tape and those are usually the four minutes people remember.
Is there food?
No. Eat before 12:00 or bring something.
Do I need to sign up?
Join the Instagram group and say you're coming. That is the sign-up. The address, any changes and the bus stop go there first.
Run by students. There is a code of conduct, and it is short.