Athens: history and heritage

About Athens: history and heritage

By the ULTIMATE Athens Editorial Team

Editor-in-Chief: Jai Michael

Athens has been lived in for some five thousand years, and few cities show their past so openly. From almost anywhere in the centre you can see the Acropolis; below it lie the Agora where citizens argued, a Roman market, Byzantine chapels, Ottoman houses in Plaka and the marble neoclassical buildings of a capital that was rebuilt from a small town in the 1830s.

At a glance

Population: 643,452 in the Municipality of Athens and 3,814,064 in Attica (Hellenic Statistical Authority, 2021 census).

Names through history: Athenai, after the goddess Athena; Setines to medieval Western travellers; Atina in Ottoman Turkish.

Rebuilt from a small town in the 1830s, Athens chose marble from the same mountain as the Parthenon.

Shaped by: Classical Greece, Rome, Byzantium, Frankish and Florentine dukes (1205–1458), the Ottoman Empire (1458–1833) and the modern Greek state.

Geography: a basin ringed by Parnitha, Penteli and Hymettus, opening to the Saronic Gulf at Piraeus.

The Classical city

People lived on the Acropolis in the Neolithic, and by the Mycenaean age it carried a palace. In the sixth and fifth centuries BC Athens developed democracy, defeated the Persians at Marathon and Salamis and, with the wealth of its navy, built the Parthenon (447–432 BC). Drama, philosophy and history as we know them took shape here: Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides in the Theatre of Dionysus, Socrates in the Agora, Plato’s Academy and Aristotle’s Lyceum on the edges of the city.

Romans and Byzantines

Rome took Greece in the second century BC, and its emperors loved Athens: Hadrian finished the Temple of Olympian Zeus and gave the city a library and an arch, and Herodes Atticus built the odeon where concerts are still held each summer. Under Byzantium Athens became a quiet Christian town; the small domed churches of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, such as Kapnikarea on Ermou Street, survive among the shops.

Franks, Venetians and Ottomans

After the Fourth Crusade of 1204, Athens was ruled by Frankish and then Florentine dukes. The Ottomans took the city in 1458, and the Parthenon, by then a church, became a mosque. In 1687, during a Venetian siege, a shell hit the gunpowder the Ottoman garrison had stored inside it, and the explosion tore the temple apart. Ottoman houses, a mosque in Monastiraki and the Fethiye Mosque in the Roman Agora survive from those centuries.

The capital of 1834

Greece won its independence in the war that began in 1821, and in 1834 the capital moved from Nafplio to Athens, then a small town of a few thousand people huddled below the Acropolis. The new king, the Bavarian prince Otto, brought architects who laid out a European city of straight streets and squares. Marble from Mount Penteli, the quarry of the Parthenon, faced the “neoclassical trilogy” on Panepistimiou Street: the Academy and the National Library by Theophil Hansen and the University by his brother Christian Hansen. Builders from the Cycladic island of Anafi settled on the slope of the Acropolis and built Anafiotika, a whitewashed island village in the middle of the city.

1923 and the modern city

After the Greek-Turkish war of 1919–1922, the population exchange of 1923 brought more than a million refugees from Asia Minor to Greece, and many settled around Athens and Piraeus, founding districts such as Nea Smyrni and Nea Ionia and bringing the music, rebetiko, and cooking of Smyrna and Constantinople. After the Second World War the city grew fast, in the concrete apartment blocks, polykatoikies, with deep balconies that define its streets today. The 2004 Olympics brought a metro, a tram and a new airport; the Acropolis Museum opened in 2009 and the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Cultural Center in 2016.

Our advice: climb the Acropolis at opening time, then walk down through the Agora and Plaka to Anafiotika, and finish at the Acropolis Museum, where the Parthenon frieze is displayed in a gallery aligned with the temple itself.

Sources

Population: Hellenic Statistical Authority (ELSTAT), 2021 Population and Housing Census. History: Hellenic Ministry of Culture; Acropolis Museum; UNESCO World Heritage Centre (Acropolis, Athens); National Archaeological Museum; Encyclopaedia Britannica, “Athens”.

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