Mego
Origins in Trikala
Drive into Trikala, a market town in Thessaly better known for its plains and its river than for industry, and it takes some imagination now to picture a motorcycle works there. But this is where Nikos Gorgolis built what would become one of Greece's most durable domestic vehicle manufacturers, working first under a brand name drawn from his own surname: Nigo. Before there was anything resembling a motorcycle, there were three-wheelers — small, cheap, load-carrying machines built for a country where most businesses needed to move goods on a budget, not chase speed.
Exactly when this began is genuinely contested. Wikipedia and other established references give 1947 as the date the first products — utility tricycles — were launched, and that year appears often enough in print to carry real weight. Other sources, including CycleMotorcycle, place the start of operations in 1955. There is no clean way to reconcile the two, and rather than pretend otherwise, it's worth simply saying: sources differ, but by most accounts Gorgolis's operation traces back to the immediate postwar years, with 1947 the date most frequently cited, though some sources put the real start of business closer to the mid-1950s. What both versions agree on is the shape of the thing — modest, practical vehicles built for Greek roads and Greek budgets, not for export markets or racetracks.
The tricycles themselves were unusual by design: small-displacement machines, with the single wheel mounted at the rear rather than the front — the reverse of the typical delivery-trike layout of the period. Sources differ on both the displacement range and the exact year this configuration appeared, a discrepancy too tangled to resolve cleanly, but the underlying fact holds: Gorgolis was building motorized load-carriers in Trikala well before Mego ever built a motorcycle meant to simply be ridden for its own sake.
The Early Years and a Change of Hands
The company's identity shifted in 1962, when it was partly sold to MEBEA, another name in Greek motorcycle manufacturing, and renamed Mego — a contraction of MEBEA and Gorgolis. The MEBEA years brought a change in product too: conventional light three-wheel trucks replaced the earlier reverse-wheel design, a more orthodox commercial vehicle for a market that was industrializing, however slowly. This arrangement lasted five years. In 1967 the Gorgolis family bought back full control of the company, but kept the Mego name that the MEBEA partnership had given it — a small irony, given that the letters no longer described the ownership structure at all.
It was through the 1960s that Mego moved decisively into motorcycles and mopeds proper, alongside its established three-wheel trucks. The company built a wide range of 50cc mopeds and small motorcycles, most of them powered by Sachs engines out of Germany — a common and sensible choice for a manufacturer without the scale to develop its own powerplants. A 125cc motorcycle arrived in 1968, pushing the range beyond utility mopeds and into something closer to a proper light motorcycle line. This was the foundation on which Mego's reputation in Greece would be built over the next two decades: not glamour, but reliability, affordability, and a product line tuned to what ordinary Greek riders and Greek institutions actually needed.
The Mego Golden Era
The years from the mid-1960s into the 1980s were Mego's real span of relevance, and the company's model lineup from this period reads like a checklist of what a Mediterranean utility manufacturer needed to offer: the 50S series, the EK, the Libra, the Viva, and the later GP50 Carrera.
The Mego 50S, dating from 1967, became the company's defining machine — updated repeatedly but kept in production, remarkably, all the way to 1983. Few models from any manufacturer survive sixteen years of running changes without either becoming obsolete or losing what made them work in the first place; the 50S managed to do both — remain in demand and remain recognizably itself — for long enough to become the machine most associated with the marque.
The EK moped sits in murkier territory. Wikipedia dates its introduction to 1971, but the academic reference by L.S. Skartsis — arguably the most careful published record of Greek vehicle manufacturing — puts it at 1966, a date also supported by CycleMotorcycle's own model gallery. That's a five-year gap, not a rounding error, and the weight of the more careful sourcing favors the earlier date: several sources put the EK's introduction at 1966, and that figure is used here. What's clear is that the EK was popular enough, and stayed in the lineup long enough, to need a direct successor: the Mego Viva arrived in 1980 specifically to replace it, and the Viva went on to become one of the company's more successful mopeds in its own right.
The GP50 Carrera followed in 1983 as the successor to the 50S — described in period and in later retrospectives as a genuinely novel design for the segment, though the specifics of what made it novel haven't survived in the sources available today. The GT50 came along in 1985, one of the last new models Mego would introduce before production wound down.
Underneath all of these names sat a consistent engineering approach: keep the machines light, keep them cheap to run, keep them built around proven Sachs engines rather than expensive in-house development, and build them for people who needed a motorcycle to do a job rather than make a statement. That philosophy sold. Mego's customers in Greece reportedly included the police, the Hellenic Post, and the Hellenic Telecommunications Organization — the kind of institutional buyers who prize durability and parts availability over performance, and who represent about as strong an endorsement of a utility machine as exists. Mego also found an export market, notably in the Netherlands, where small, economical mopeds had an obvious audience.
Racing
Here the record is thin to the point of being effectively blank. Nothing in the available documentation on Mego points to a factory racing program, contracted riders, or championship results of any kind. That absence is probably not an oversight of history so much as an accurate reflection of what the company was: a manufacturer of mopeds and utility vehicles built for postal routes, police fleets, and family transport, not for the circuit. If Mego machines turned wheels in club or regional competition in Greece during the 1960s and '70s, as small-capacity machines of that era very often did informally, no reliable published account of it has survived. It would be dishonest to invent a racing pedigree the marque doesn't appear to have chased.
Ownership, Decline, and the Long Afterlife
Mego's manufacturing life came to an end the way a lot of small national manufacturers' lives ended in the late 1980s: not through some single catastrophic failure, but through the slow arithmetic of cheaper competition. Secondhand imports — better-specified, often barely used machines flooding in from wealthier markets — undercut the case for buying new from a small domestic builder. Mego stopped building motorcycles in 1988. The company itself didn't disappear immediately; it kept operating until 1992, mostly servicing the machines already on Greek roads and supplying parts to owners who weren't ready to give up on a 50S or a Viva that still ran fine.
After 1992 the business reorganized as Gorgolis S.A., pivoting from manufacturing into importing and distributing motorcycles — a far less romantic business, but a sustainable one. From there the company expanded outward in a way the old Trikala works never had, setting up subsidiaries in Japan, the Dominican Republic, Venezuela, and China. Out of this expansion came Nipponia, a brand name chosen deliberately to evoke Japanese build quality, applied to a line of motorcycles designed in Greece and manufactured in Shanghai. A Nipponia world headquarters was established in Athens, overseeing design, engineering, marketing, and quality control for machines physically built in China but conceived under the same corporate roof that had once turned out the 50S and the Carrera.
Mego Today
As a manufacturing marque, Mego is finished. No motorcycle carrying the Mego name has been built since 1988, and the Trikala production line that once supplied the Hellenic Post and the Greek police exists now only in old catalogues, private collections, and the memories of Greek riders who grew up on 50cc Sachs-powered mopeds. But the corporate lineage didn't die with it. Gorgolis S.A. carries the name forward, and Nipponia — its successor brand — is a going concern, still marketing motorcycles across Europe today.
The design work on that current range has, since 2002, come from Sotiris Kovos, a Greek automobile designer born in Athens in 1965 who built his reputation designing the Toyota Yaris, introduced in 1999. It's a curious full circle for a company that started out building reverse-wheel utility trikes in provincial Thessaly: a name born from a founder's surname and a corporate merger now attached to motorcycles styled by someone who once shaped a mass-market Toyota hatchback.
For collectors, the interest sits firmly in the old machines — the 50S in its many running-change iterations, the GP50 Carrera, the Viva, and the EK. These aren't machines that show up often outside Greece, and they were never built with an eye toward posterity. But among European vintage-motorcycle circles and Greek enthusiasts in particular, original Mego mopeds and light motorcycles are recognized as honest artifacts of a specific moment in Hellenic industry — small, practical, Sachs-powered machines that did their job for the police, the post office, and ordinary Greek households for the better part of three decades, without ever pretending to be anything grander than that.