🇬🇷 Greece · Athens and Attica
Few cities carry such symbolic weight as Athens. Here, some 2,500 years ago, democracy, philosophy, theatre and a good part of the ideas that still shape the Western world were born. Walking its streets means moving between layers of history: a classical column beside a Byzantine church, an Ottoman mosque next to a neoclassical building, and always, crowning it all from its sacred rock, the Acropolis with the Parthenon cut out against the sky. It is one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities on the planet.
But Athens is not just an open-air museum. It is a loud, vital, contradictory Mediterranean capital that over recent decades has reinvented itself into a surprisingly modern destination. In neighbourhoods such as Psiri, Exarchia or Koukaki, graffiti and galleries live side by side, as do cocktail bars and lifelong tavernas; the rooftops with Parthenon views fill at sunset; and Greek food — souvlaki, moussaka, feta, ouzo — is enjoyed at tables spilling onto the pavements. The city runs on a young energy that surprises anyone who imagined it only as an archaeological site.
This guide covers Athens with a practical, warm eye: how to organise the Acropolis visit to dodge the heat and the crowds, which museums not to miss, where to wander on foot, how to get around by metro, where to eat well and how to use the city as a base for the rest of Greece. Athens rewards the curious traveller: behind every corner there is a piece of human history, and in front of you, a taverna where you can raise an ouzo to the health of the gods.
Athens owes its name to Athena, the goddess of wisdom, who according to myth won the patronage of the city over Poseidon by giving it the olive tree. Inhabited since the Neolithic, by Mycenaean times (second millennium BC) the rock of the Acropolis was already a fortified citadel. But its glorious moment came in the 5th century BC, the 'Golden Age' of Pericles, after the Persian Wars: in those decades Athens consolidated democracy — rule by the people, a revolutionary invention — raised the Parthenon and the other temples of the Acropolis, and became the intellectual centre of the Greek world, with Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, the tragedians Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, and the historian Thucydides. After defeat by Sparta in the Peloponnesian War and the later Macedonian conquest, Athens kept its cultural prestige. Under Rome it was a revered university city. In Byzantine times the pagan temples were turned into churches, and after 1456 the city fell under Ottoman rule for almost four centuries, shrinking to a village. In 1687, during a Venetian siege, an explosion devastated the Parthenon, which was being used as a powder magazine. With the Greek War of Independence, Athens was chosen as capital of the new kingdom in 1834 and rebuilt in neoclassical style. The 20th century turned it into a large metropolis, marked by the mass arrival of Greek refugees from Asia Minor in 1922. Today, with the 2004 Olympic Games behind it, Athens combines its ancient heritage with the life of a contemporary European capital. The full story is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The cradle of democracy and philosophy: the Acropolis and the Parthenon, the city of Pericles, Socrates and Plato, razed by the Persians and rebuilt in marble, capital of modern Greece since 1834 and the political heart of all its tragedies and revivals.
Read the history of Athens and Attica →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
According to the myth the Athenians themselves told about the origin of their city, Athens owes its name to a dispute between two deities. Athena, goddess of wisdom, strategy and craft, and Poseidon, god of the sea, contended for the patronage of the emerging city. To decide who would protect it, each offered a gift to its inhabitants. Poseidon struck the rock of the Acropolis with his trident and made a spring of salt water gush out (or, in other versions, gave the first horse). Athena, instead, made an olive tree grow, a tree that gave oil, food, wood and light. The Athenians, or the mythical king Cecrops as arbiter, chose Athena's gift, and the city took her name.
That myth is not just a story: it condenses the identity the Athenians claimed for themselves. The olive tree became the symbol of the city and of Greece as a whole, and a sacred olive grew beside the Erechtheion, on the Acropolis itself. Choosing Athena over Poseidon spoke of a city that valued intelligence, civilisation and the cultivation of the land above the brute force of the sea, even though Athens would also become a great naval power.
Beyond the myth, archaeology confirms that the rock of the Acropolis was inhabited from remote times. Already in the Mycenaean period (second millennium BC) it was a fortified citadel with a palace, protected by Cyclopean walls of which remains still survive. Athens is, in fact, one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world, with occupation going back thousands of years. The legend of Athena and the olive tree is how that very ancient community explained, in sacred terms, why its city was special.
The 5th century BC was the most glorious moment in Athenian history, and it all began with an existential threat: the Persian Empire. In what are known as the Persian Wars, the Greek cities faced the Persian giant in battles carved into the Western memory. In 490 BC the Athenians defeated the Persians on the plain of Marathon; ten years later, in 480 BC, after the Spartan sacrifice at Thermopylae and the burning of Athens itself, the Greek fleet — with the Athenian triremes at its heart — crushed the Persian fleet at the naval battle of Salamis, within sight of the city. Those victories saved Greek independence and gave Athens immense prestige.
After the wars, Athens led the Delian League, an alliance of city-states meant to defend against Persia, which soon turned into a genuine Athenian maritime empire. With the resources and the confidence of that hegemony, and under the leadership of the statesman Pericles, the city lived its 'Golden Age'. Pericles drove the monumental rebuilding of the Acropolis, razed by the Persians: within a few decades the Parthenon, the Propylaea, the temple of Athena Nike and the Erechtheion went up, the work of architects such as Ictinus and Callicrates and of the sculptor Phidias. It was the showcase of Athenian power and culture.
But the Golden Age was much more than stone. Athens perfected democracy — direct rule by the people (free male citizens) gathered in the Assembly — a revolutionary political invention. It was the stage where the great tragedians Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides and the comic playwright Aristophanes wrote; where Herodotus and Thucydides founded history; and where, shortly afterwards, Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, the fathers of Western philosophy, taught. Never before had such a small city concentrated so much human creativity.
Athenian splendour carried the seed of its own decline. Its growing imperial power and its rivalry with Sparta, the great land military power of the Peloponnese, led to the Peloponnesian War (431–404 BC), a long and devastating conflict that set almost the whole Greek world against itself in two blocs. The war, magnificently narrated by the Athenian historian Thucydides, combined land and naval campaigns, fragile truces and disasters such as the failed Athenian expedition to Sicily.
To the pressure of the war was added an unexpected catastrophe: a terrible plague swept Athens around 430 BC, in the first years of the conflict, killing an enormous share of the population crowded behind the walls. Among the victims was Pericles himself. The city held out for decades, but finally, in 404 BC, defeated and blockaded, Athens had to capitulate to Sparta, lose its fleet and its walls and see its empire dissolved.
Athens recovered partially in the 4th century BC, but it would never dominate Greece again. It was a time of instability among the city-states, while to the north a new power was rising: the kingdom of Macedon. Philip II of Macedon defeated a Greek coalition led by Athens and Thebes at the battle of Chaeronea (338 BC), ending the political independence of the Greek cities. His son, Alexander the Great, would carry Greek culture to the edges of Asia. Despite losing political power, Athens kept its prestige intact: it remained the great intellectual centre of the world, the city of the philosophical schools, where the elites of the whole Mediterranean came to be educated.
In 146 BC Greece passed into Rome's orbit, and Athens joined the Roman world. But far from being just another city, the Romans revered it as the cradle of culture and learning: it was the 'university' of the Empire, where well-off families sent their sons to study philosophy and rhetoric. Philhellene emperors such as Hadrian embellished it with new buildings; in Athens you can still see the Arch of Hadrian and the remains of the colossal Temple of Olympian Zeus, finished in his time, as well as the Library of Hadrian and the Roman Agora with the elegant Tower of the Winds.
With the division of the Empire and the rise of Christianity, Athens entered the Byzantine period. Its pagan intellectual brilliance dimmed: in AD 529 the emperor Justinian closed the philosophical schools, a symbol of the end of classical antiquity. The pagan temples were turned into Christian churches — the Parthenon itself was for centuries a church dedicated to the Virgin — and the city, now a provincial town of the Byzantine Empire, filled with small and beautiful Byzantine churches, several of which still survive in the centre.
In 1456, a few years after the fall of Constantinople, Athens fell under Ottoman rule, which would last almost four centuries. During that time the city shrank to a modest village at the foot of the Acropolis, which the Turks used as a fortress and garrison; the Parthenon was turned into a mosque. The most tragic episode came in 1687, during a Venetian siege: a shell hit the Parthenon, which the Ottomans were using as a powder magazine, and the explosion destroyed a good part of a temple that had survived more than two thousand years almost intact. A few years later, at the start of the 19th century, Lord Elgin took many of its sculptures to London, the famous and disputed 'Elgin Marbles'.
The fate of Athens turned radically with the Greek War of Independence (1821–1830), in which the Greeks rose against the Ottoman Empire and, with the support of the European powers, managed to create an independent state. Choosing the capital of the new kingdom was a decision loaded with symbolism: in 1834 Athens was picked, then a small and half-ruined town, precisely for its prestige as the cradle of Western civilisation and of democracy. The weight of its past counted for more than its modest present.
The first king of Greece, Otto of Bavaria, arrived with European architects and planners who redesigned the city almost from scratch. Athens was given a modern street plan and public buildings in neoclassical style, deliberately in dialogue with the classical heritage: the Royal Palace (today the Parliament, on Syntagma square), the University, the Academy and the National Library (the famous neoclassical 'trilogy' on Panepistimiou street) and many mansions of the new elite. The city grew quickly around the Acropolis, recovering its central role in Greek life.
The 20th century turned that 19th-century capital into a large metropolis. A key event was the 'Great Catastrophe' of 1922: after the Greek defeat in the war against Turkey in Asia Minor, more than a million Greek refugees from Anatolia arrived in Greece, and many settled around Athens, which expanded enormously and gave rise to new neighbourhoods. The city then went through occupation during the Second World War, a bloody civil war and, in the second half of the century, rapid and often chaotic growth that made it the great city it is today.
The Athens of today is a modern European capital living street by street with its ancient heritage. After decades of disordered growth and pollution problems, the city took on a deep modernisation in the late 20th century, whose great push came from hosting the 2004 Olympic Games. It was no accidental choice: the Games returned to the city that had hosted the first Olympic Games of the modern era in 1896, in the restored Panathenaic Stadium, the only stadium in the world built entirely of marble.
Ahead of 2004 Athens transformed itself: a new international airport was built, the metro was extended and modernised (its excavations, incidentally, brought to light numerous archaeological finds now displayed in the stations themselves), and new motorways, a tram and a suburban railway were created. The great 'Archaeological Route' linking the main sites of the centre at the foot of the Acropolis was also pedestrianised, one of the best urban interventions in the city, letting you walk from monument to monument without traffic.
In 2009 the new Acropolis Museum opened, a modern building at the foot of the sacred rock, designed to house the monument's treasures properly and one day to receive the sculptures still kept in London. Despite suffering badly from the economic crisis of the 2010s, Athens reinvented itself as a cultural and food destination, with revitalised neighbourhoods, a vibrant street art scene and intense nightlife. Today the city offers the unique mix that makes it unforgettable: the Parthenon crowning the skyline and, at its feet, a Mediterranean metropolis full of life.