The buttery smell of freshly popped popcorn is still in the breeze. The jasmine wafts over from the near by gardens caresses my nostrils. The grin on my grandfather’s face while he smokes a cigarette and watches a movie still comes to my eyes sometimes. I can still hear the scratching sound of the old speakers. And the starlit sky comes back to me in my dreams.

As an adult, I go to the Ilioupolis open-air cinema to refresh my memories.

And I’m lucky I still can. In the 1960s Athens had over 1000 open-air cinemas. Now the number has fallen to 100. Huge television screens, VCRs and air-conditioned cinema giants have stolen the show from this fading part of Greek culture.

Most of the owners of summer cinemas sold their land in the sixties and seventies to people who turned them into giant super-markets or discos.

“It wasn’t to your advantage to have a summer cinema and not to make it into a building,” says Theodoros Rigas, the head of the summer cinema association.

In cities like Ilioupolis or Agia Paraskevi open air cinemas closed down from one summer to the next. Now they are discos or shoe stores. When you walk past them, it would never cross your mind that people watched movies there under the starlight.

But aren’t cinemas a source of entertainment? Why would anyone close them down?

“It’s only now that movie theaters make a lot of money,” says Andreas Georganos, head of the cultural development center in Ilioupolis. “Back then it wasn’t the same. Their owners got afraid of bankruptcy and closed them down because cinemas in the sixties and seventies were not that popular.”

One of the biggest threats to open-air theaters in Athens is the Australian cinema giant Village Roadshow, which opened in Marrousi in 1997 and since then has spread its theaters all over the city. “The only reason people did not go to the cinema in the summer was because there was nothing to see since summer cinemas only showed the re-runs”, says Village Roadshow managing director in Greece Harris Antonopoulos.

Because air-conditioned, first-run Village cinemas stay open in the summer, open-air theaters empty out.

“Village Roadshow did much better in the summer of 2002 than open-air cinemas, although a lot of Greek people thought that that would never happen,” says Antonopoulos with a grin.

Some industry watchers say that with the arrival of more multiplexes many more open-air theaters will close down. Others say that it will make no difference.

“Greek open air cinemas are going though a period of transition, and the arrival of Village has coincided with, and led to, a lot of changes,” says Christos Mitsis, the editor of Greece’s Cinema magazine.

I spent most of my summers at the open-air cinema “Melina Mercouri”, in Ilioupolis and I would never trade my memories there for anything. It was not simply the movies I watched, but the experiences I had there. Even the bad ones. The uncomfortable seats, the pebbles that hurt your feet every time you moved, the smell of souvlaki from a nearby restaurant driving the mosquitoes to feast on my legs.

A perfect cinema – with the perfect room temperature of 22 degrees, perfect sound, perfect screen and perfect, pre-arranged seating – could never provide such memories. And when you look up…where are all the stars?