About Athens

Athens takes its name from Athena, the goddess the city adopted as its patron, and its recorded history runs back more than 3,400 years. The classical centre still sits inside a working metropolis of some 3.6 million people, and the two are hard to separate: a marble column on one corner, an apartment block on the next, an excavation left open under a metro station.

A Short History of the City

• Ancient Athens: through the 1st millennium BC Athens became the leading city-state of Greece, and the 5th century BC brought the building programme, the drama and the political experiments that later ages took as the foundation of Western civilisation. The Acropolis, a UNESCO World Heritage site, dates largely from those decades.
• Byzantine, Frankish and Ottoman Athens: after antiquity the city shrank to a provincial town, and pagan monuments lost their standing as the empire Christianised. Following the Fourth Crusade of 1204 it became the seat of the Latin Duchy of Athens, which lasted until 1458, when Sultan Mehmed II took the city and issued an edict forbidding the looting of its monuments. The Parthenon was converted into the main mosque of Athens.
• Modern Athens: in 1834 the city replaced Nafplio as capital of the newly independent Greek state, at a point when only a few thousand people lived in the houses clustered below the Acropolis. The city proper counted 643,452 residents at the 2021 census, with more than three million in the wider urban area.

Athens Today: Ancient and Modern Side by Side

The city is often described as an open-air museum, but it is a working one. Excavated sites sit between office blocks, and the pedestrian route from Thiseio to Plaka links half a dozen of them in a single walk. Beyond the ruins there are theatres, galleries and music venues carrying both traditional and contemporary Greek work, a restaurant scene that runs from neighbourhood tavernas to Michelin-starred kitchens, and a night out that lasts as long as anywhere in the Mediterranean.

Sites Worth Setting Aside Time For

• The Acropolis: the ancient citadel above the city, with the Parthenon as its centrepiece, along with the Erechtheion and the Temple of Athena Nike.
• Museums: the Acropolis Museum, built to hold the sculpture taken off the rock, and the National Archaeological Museum, which covers Greek antiquity as a whole.
• Other ancient sites: the Panathenaic Stadium, rebuilt in marble for the first modern Olympics of 1896; the Temple of Olympian Zeus; and the Ancient Agora, the civic centre of the classical city.

The Athenian Riviera

The coastline south of the city, known as the Athenian Riviera, runs from the southern suburbs down towards the tip of the Attica peninsula. Astir Beach, on the Laimos peninsula at Vouliagmeni, is the most exclusive stretch, roughly 300 metres of organised sand; Niriides, on the same peninsula, is another of the well-equipped beaches. Watersports operators work most of the organised bays, and seaside tavernas line the road between them.

The organised beaches stop where the coast turns rocky. Past Vouliagmeni the shoreline breaks into the limanakia, a chain of small coves in deep blue water that you reach on foot down a rough path, or far more easily from the sea, which is why so many visitors explore Athens by private gulet charter.

Practical Notes for Visitors

Spring and autumn are the easiest months for sightseeing; summer is hot but carries the festival calendar. The metro and bus network is efficient, though the historic centre is best covered on foot, and Plaka, with its narrow lanes and neoclassical houses, rewards walking more than any other quarter.

Ermou Street is the main shopping street, lined with international chains and Greek boutiques, while Kolonaki holds the higher-end shops and commercial galleries. For eating, moussaka, souvlaki and baklava are the obvious starting points, but Athenian menus vary by neighbourhood and by season more than the tourist standards suggest.