ATHENS (Greece) - ERMOU Street in downtown Athens, where real estate prices are among the highest in Europe, was blackened and strewn with glass on Sunday after a night of rioting following the death of a teenager in a police shooting.

At least 21 shops were damaged over a three-block section of the street, off Athens' famed Syntagma Square. Many shops had their doors blown away and were left wide open, although there was no sign of looting. One block was closed early Sunday as firefighters still battled a blaze that had left a three-story emporium a blackened skeleton with a smoking roof.

Greek government urges restraint after riots ATHENS (Greece) - GREECE'S interior minister called for restraint during demonstrations planned on Sunday to protest the killing of a teenager by police, after extensive overnight rioting in several Greek cities. The circumstances surrounding the death of the 16-year-old boy were unclear. Police issued a statement saying that the two officers involved claimed their patrol car came under attack by a group of youths in the downtown Exarchia district of Athens. ... more

People strolled calmly through the damage, their shoes crunching on glass. A slight haze of tear gas still hung in the air. Repeated alarms drew little attention.

The riots that engulfed Athens Saturday night, spreading to Greece's second-largest city of Thessaloniki and at least five other provincial towns, were the most serious since January 1991. Then, two large department stores were burned and four people died as a firebomb-throwing crowd protested the slaying of a left-wing school teacher at the hands of right-wingers.

No serious injuried were reported in Saturday night's violence.

And while clothing shops - the majority of Ermou Street outlets - and banks were heavily damaged, the numerous snack bars were all left intact and were full of customers in the early hours of Sunday.

A few blocks north of Syntagma Square, at Akadimias Street, another main Athens thoroughfare, the rioters had almost totally destroyed the bus stops and ticket kiosks used daily by hundreds of thousands of commuters in what is one of the city's major transport hubs. A few of the rioters - almost all of them self-styled anarchists - were still there, some still masked and some armed with steel pipes warily eyeing the riot police camped two blocks further on.

There seemed to be no prospect of imminent intervention, however: the elite policemen were casually chatting in small groups and they were separated from the rioters by a burning barricade, stoked by chairs and the plastic roofs of dismantled bus stops. -- AP