Athens

• 1. The City Of The Violet Crown

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  Pindar called it iostephanoi Athanai, the city of the violet crown. Athenians once pinned golden cicadas in their hair, calling themselves cicada-wearers, a sign they had sprung from the earth itself. The recorded history of this place runs more than 3,400 years, and human presence may reach back to somewhere between the 11th and 7th millennia BC. A cave called the Cave of Schist holds the oldest known trace of people here. Today more than 3.6 million people fill its urban area, the eighth-largest in the European Union. How does a single city carry the weight of being called the cradle of Western civilisation? Who decided to name it after a goddess of wisdom, and why do scholars now think the naming ran the other way? What survived the fires, sieges, and explosions that battered its temples across thousands of years? The answers begin with a contest between two gods over a salt-water spring and an olive tree.

• 2. A Goddess And A Trident

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  Cecrops, the king of Athens, was appointed judge in a contest for a city that had no name yet. Athena, goddess of wisdom and war, faced Poseidon, god of the seas, and each offered a gift. In the account of Pseudo-Apollodorus, Poseidon struck the ground with his trident and a salt-water spring welled up. In Virgil's poem Georgics, Poseidon instead gave the Athenians the first horse. Athena, in both versions, offered the first domesticated olive tree, and Cecrops chose her gift. Modern scholars reverse the old assumption. The goddess takes her name from the city, not the other way round, because the ending -ene is common in place names but rare in personal ones. The root itself is probably not Greek or Indo-European at all. It may be a remnant of the Pre-Greek substrate of Attica. Across the centuries the name shifted and warped. Medieval writers produced Setines, Satine, and Astines through false splitting of prepositional phrases. King Alphonse X of Castile credited Ovid with the etymology the place without death, because the city's arts and sciences never die.

• 3. Democracy And Its Golden Age

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  Cleisthenes introduced democracy in 508 BC, building on the earlier reforms of Solon that had answered widespread social unrest. By then the city was a naval power and lent its fleet to the Ionian cities rebelling against Persia. Miltiades led the Athenians to a decisive victory at Marathon in 490 BC, and Themistocles broke the Persians at Salamis in 480 BC. None of this spared the city. The Persians captured and sacked Athens twice within a single year, after the failed stand at Thermopylae by Leonidas and his Spartans. Pericles guided the decades that followed, promoting the arts and fostering democracy. He launched the building program that raised the Acropolis and the Parthenon. The playwrights Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides worked here, alongside the historians Herodotus and Thucydides, the physician Hippocrates, and the philosophers Socrates and Plato. The Delian League, first an alliance against Persia led by Cimon, became a vehicle for Athenian empire. That ambition bred the Peloponnesian War of 431 to 404 BC, which ended in defeat by Sparta. The city recovered to form the Second Athenian League. Then Macedon rose, and in 338 BC Philip II and his son Alexander the Great crushed an Athenian-led alliance at the Battle of Chaeronea.

• 4. Rome, Christ, And Decline

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  The Roman emperor Hadrian held Athenian citizenship and ordered new public buildings in the second century AD. Rome had granted the city free status because of its admired schools. Paul the Apostle visited on his second missionary journey. A Germanic tribe sacked the city in 267 AD. The conversion of the empire from paganism to Christianity reshaped everything. The Parthenon, Erechtheion and Hephaisteion were turned into churches, and reverence for the old city fell away. Athens stayed a centre of Neoplatonism, teaching pupils such as Gregory of Nazianzus, Basil of Caesarea, and the emperor Julian. The Herules in 267 and the Visigoths under Alaric I in 396 dealt heavy blows, shrinking the city to a small fortified core. Justinian I banned pagans from teaching philosophy in 529, an event generally taken to mark the end of ancient Athens. Slavs sacked the city in 582, yet it stayed in imperial hands. The emperor Constans II visited in 662 or 663. Empress Irene of Athens helped end the first period of Iconoclasm at the Second Council of Nicaea in 787. Another Athenian, Theophano, became empress as wife of Staurakios. The 11th and 12th centuries brought a golden age of Byzantine art, when almost all the important Middle Byzantine churches around the city were built.

• 5. Conquerors And A Powder Magazine

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  The Fourth Crusade conquered Athens in 1204, and for centuries it would not be Greek in government again. From 1204 until 1458, Latins ruled in three separate periods, a stretch known as the Frankokratia. The first Ottoman attack came in 1397 under the generals Yaqub Pasha and Timurtash. Sultan Mehmed II took the city in person in 1458 and was so struck by its ancient monuments that he issued a firman forbidding their looting or destruction, on pain of death. The Parthenon became the city's main mosque. Under Ottoman rule the city shrank to what Franz Babinger called a small country town. From the early 17th century it fell under the Kizlar Agha, the chief black eunuch of the Sultan's harem, after Sultan Ahmed I had first granted it to a favourite concubine named Basilica. The Turks stored gunpowder in the Parthenon and Propylaea. A lightning bolt destroyed the Propylaea in 1640. In 1687, during the Morean War, the Venetians under Francesco Morosini besieged the Acropolis. A shot ignited the powder magazine inside the Parthenon on the 26th of September, and the explosion gave the building much of the ruined look it carries today. Both sides looted it, and one western pediment was torn down. The Venetian occupation lasted six months before they abandoned the city again on the 9th of April 1688.

• 6. A Town Of Four Thousand Becomes A Capital

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  In 1834 Athens replaced Nafplio as the capital of the newly independent Greek state, chosen largely for historical and sentimental reasons. War had reduced it to a town of roughly 4,000 people, a loose swarm of houses at the foot of the Acropolis. King Otto of Bavaria commissioned the architects Stamatios Kleanthis and Eduard Schaubert to draw a modern plan. They laid out a triangle anchored by the Acropolis, the ancient cemetery of Kerameikos, and the new palace that now houses the Greek Parliament. Neoclassicism shaped the new public buildings, with architects such as Hansen, Klenze, Boulanger and Kaftantzoglou at work. In 1896 the city hosted the first modern Olympic Games. In the 1920s, refugees expelled from Asia Minor after the Greco-Turkish war and the population exchange swelled its numbers. They brought Rebetiko music with them, which became the base for Laiko. World War II brought Axis occupation and the Great Famine, with EAM leading the Greek Resistance from inside the city. After liberation came the Dekemvriana, heavy fighting between communist forces and government forces backed by the British. The population then boomed through the 1950s and 1960s.

• 7. The Hottest City And Its Cures

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  Athens has been called the hottest city in mainland Europe, and it became the first city in Europe to appoint a chief heat officer for severe heat waves. Temperatures of 47.5 degrees Celsius and above have been recorded across the metropolitan area. Elefsina, west of the city, held the World Meteorological Organization record for the highest temperature in Europe until 2021, with 48.0 degrees recorded on the 10th of July 1977. The city sits in a basin ringed by four mountains: Aigaleo to the west, Parnitha to the north, Pentelicus to the northeast, and Hymettus to the east. Those mountains create a temperature inversion that makes Athenian meteorology among the most complex in the world. By the late 1970s pollution had grown destructive. The Greek Minister of Culture Constantine Trypanis described how carved details on the five caryatids of the Erechtheum had degenerated, and the face of the horseman on the Parthenon's west side was all but obliterated. Measures through the 1990s improved the air, and the smog the Athenians called nefos grew less common. In June 2007 brush fires burned much of the national park on Mount Parnitha, considered critical to the city's air quality, raising fears the gains might stall.

• 8. Stones, Stages, And Three Clubs

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  Athens holds 148 theatrical stages, more than any other city in the world, among them the ancient Odeon of Herodes Atticus that hosts the Athens Festival from May to October. The National Archaeological Museum carries the world's largest collection of ancient Greek antiquities, with artefacts spanning more than 5,000 years. The city guards two UNESCO World Heritage Sites, the Acropolis and the medieval Daphni Monastery, and strict height limits keep the Acropolis visible across the skyline. The American-born soprano Maria Callas spent her teenage years here, settling in 1937 and launching her opera career in 1940 with the Greek National Opera. In 2023 the Municipality opened the Maria Callas Museum on Mitropoleos street. Greater Athens supports three multi-sport clubs: Panathinaikos from the city, Olympiacos from Piraeus, and AEK from Nea Filadelfeia. Olympiacos became the only Greek club to win a European competition, the 2023-24 UEFA Europa Conference League. The city hosted the Summer Olympics in 1896 and again in 2004, after defeating Rome by 66 votes to 41 in Lausanne on the 5th of September 1997. Those 2004 games welcomed more than 10,000 athletes from 202 countries, and the port of Piraeus remains the second-busiest passenger port in Europe.