Ange Postecoglou has once again been honoured in his hometown Melbourne with a mural, this time even closer to home in Prahran.
Last December, Peter Giasoumi and Dean Kotsianis from Yitonia, a bespoke network and project facilitator, and Dean ‘Kosta’ Drossos put up giant posters of Postecoglou in the city’s iconic Hosier Lane.
“ANGE TOWN“, as the mural is titled, now finds its way to the wall of café Penance, a Hellenic hideaway nestled just off Chapel St.
The new mural depicts Postecoglou through seven stages of his managing career, with visuals of him at his boyhood club South Melbourne FC, Greek club Panachaiki, Whittlesea Zebras, A-League sides Brisbane Roar and Melbourne Victory, the Australian national team, Yokohama F. Marinos, Celtic and Tottenham Hotspur.
Kosta spoke to Neos Kosmos about why he, with the help of Yitonia, wanted to bring “ANGE TOWN” back.
“This mural obviously piggybacks the work that we’ve done in Hosier Lane, but unfortunately, that only lasted around 72 hours,” he said.
“So, sitting there having that mural pretty much gone as fast as it went up, we always knew that we had to do it again.
“It was just a question of when that opportunity was going to take place.”
That opportunity came when it was announced Ange would be returning to Melbourne with Tottenham playing Newcastle in a friendly match this Wednesday.
“We thought it’s a perfect time to kick start it again and to do it bigger and better in the suburb he grew up in.
Ange migrated from Greece as a young boy and like many other Greeks, his family settled in Prahran.
His family lived behind the old jam factory with another family and he went to Prahran High School, where you could say his management career began.
As an 11-year-old, he set up a team himself, coaching his young team-mates to an undefeated season and the state championship, scoring one of the goals himself in the final.
With Ange now back in Melbourne, he has also been gifted a framed photo of the first mural.
Penance owner Stavros Fisher, who took over the café and renamed it last year, agreed to have the new mural on the outer wall of his café because he believes “Ange is symbolic of the immigrant struggle.”
“(His family) fleeing from hardship to build a life anew. He may be the greatest Greek Australian success story.”
While the original mural brought a lot of attention from tourists, some didn’t know who Ange was, they were just interested in seeing new cool art, Prahran was much more personal with who stopped by to chat.
“Some guy walks up and he’s like, ‘oh that’s Ange, he lived here’,” Kosta said.
“Then we had a random woman come up who told us she went to high school with him and lived a block away.
“We had people from his youth coming up and saying we absolutely love this. So while we didn’t have the quantity, I feel that we had more people that really resonated with him because they knew him from back in the day or were Greek themselves.
Kosta also wants Ange to know just how proud the Greek community in Australia are of him.
“I want him to appreciate kind of what he’s done for the community and more so for him to be able to really see what we, at home, feel because obviously we’ve all come with immigrant parents or grandparents and for him to make it, it really is inspiring,” he said.
“So, for him to see the progression of his career and have it visualised on a wall. It’s really just something to reflect on and hopefully he’s proud of himself as well.”
