Athens

Athens is the capital city of Greece.

In the middle of the city is a big rocky hill called the Acropolis. On top stand very old buildings made of white marble. The sea is close by.

Athens is the capital of Greece. It lies in a dry basin ringed by mountains, about 8 kilometers from the Aegean Sea, where its port, Piraeus, stands. About 643,000 people lived in the city itself in 2021, and many more live in the towns that have grown up around it.

People have lived here for more than 5,000 years. About 2,500 years ago, Athens was one of the leading cities of Greece, a center of art, ideas, theater and an early kind of democracy. Many of those ideas still shape the world today, so Athens is often called the birthplace of Western civilization.

Athens lies about 8 km from the Bay of Phaleron, an inlet of the Aegean where its port, Piraeus, stands, in an arid basin divided north–south by a line of hills and ringed by mountains: Párnis (1,413 m), Pentelicus, Hymettos and Aigáleon. The Kifisós and the often-dry Ilisós cross the basin. Greater Athens covers 427 km²; the municipality had 643,452 residents in the 2021 census.

Britannica calls Athens generally considered the birthplace of Western civilization, the source of many Classical ideas in philosophy, architecture, literature and politics. Its modern story is very different: by 1833, after the war of independence, it held perhaps 4,000 people, and the capital of the new kingdom of Greece was planned largely from scratch. The 2004 Olympic Games brought a dramatic makeover, with new venues, an expanded transit system and a new airport.

On top of the Acropolis is the Parthenon. It has rows of tall marble columns.

Below the hill is an old open-air theater with stone seats, where concerts are still held. Nearby, a big museum keeps statues found on the hill.

The Acropolis is a steep rocky hill with springs near its base and only one way up, so from the earliest times it was used as a fortress and a place of worship. In the 400s BCE the statesman Pericles had it rebuilt with marble buildings, including the Parthenon, a temple finished in 438 BCE, and the Propylaea, the grand gateway.

The Parthenon's builders were very clever: none of its columns is perfectly straight up and down, and each leans slightly inward, though you cannot see it. Below the hill stands the Odeon of Herodes Atticus, a theater from 161 CE still used for summer concerts, and the modern Acropolis Museum, opened in 2009.

The Acropolis, a World Heritage Site since 1987, was a citadel from the Late Bronze Age, when a massive wall of huge unmortared blocks was built around it about 1200 BCE. UNESCO credits its great 5th-century rebuilding to the plans of the statesman Pericles, guided by the sculptor Pheidias: the Parthenon, by Ictinus, the Erechtheion and the Propylaea, the only entrance through the surrounding wall. Britannica describes the Parthenon's optical refinements: no vertical line in the colonnade is truly straight, and the columns lean toward the center.

The building's later history is written in its stones: traces of wall paintings from its use as a church, the stair of a minaret from its time as a mosque, and the damage of September 26, 1687, when Venetian artillery hit gunpowder stored inside. Lord Elgin removed most of the remaining sculpture after 1801. Below the rock, Herodes Atticus built a 5,000-seat odeum in 161 CE, now home to the Athens summer festival; the Acropolis Museum, designed by Bernard Tschumi, opened in 2009 less than 300 m from the Parthenon.

Athens is sunny and warm.

Summers are hot and dry. Winters are mild, and snow hardly ever stays on the ground. People can play and eat outside almost all year.

Athens has a gentle climate. Summers are hot and dry, with temperatures that can reach about 37 °C, but a fresh breeze from the northeast often blows during the day and the nights are cool. Winters are mild: frost is rare and snow seldom stays on the ground. On an average day the temperature reaches about 13 °C in January and about 34 °C in July.

Because the weather allows people to be outdoors all year, Britannica says it has shaped the city's buildings and way of life. The basin around the city is dry, and the Kifisós River is only a trickle in summer.

Britannica calls the climate of Athens benign: frost is rare, with minimum temperatures around 0 °C, snow seldom lies, and summers are hot, reaching about 37 °C, but dry, with a fresh northeasterly wind by day and cool nights. It adds that the climate, which permits outdoor activity all year, has strongly influenced the city's architecture, its way of life and even its political institutions. Long-term averages published by the World Meteorological Organization (1955–1997) give daily highs of about 13 °C in January and 34 °C in July, and only about 410 mm of rain a year, most of it from October to March.

The Athens basin is arid. The Kifisós is only a trickle in summer and the Ilisós is often dry, so the growing city had to bring water from far away: an artificial lake at Marathon proved insufficient, and the Mórnos River, about 177 km to the northwest, was dammed and tapped. Heavy rains pouring off bare mountainsides can also cause floods, so flood controls were built along with a modern sewer system.

Athens has busy squares and little old streets.

In the old neighborhood under the Acropolis, there are tiny houses, steps and small restaurants. Families visit museums full of ancient treasures. In summer, there are concerts in an old theater.

Below the Acropolis lies the Plaka, an old neighborhood of small houses, steep lanes and tiny squares with restaurants. Nearby, around Monastiraki Square, little shops sell everything from antiques to copper copies of the city's monuments. Most of Athens, though, is modern, with apartment buildings that spread out to the sea.

Athens has many museums, including the National Archaeological Museum. Every summer the Athens Festival brings music and drama to the ancient Odeon of Herodes Atticus. Most people in Greece belong to the Greek Orthodox Church.

Athens grew rapidly after independence and again in the early 1920s, when refugees from Asia Minor arrived; rural migration during World War II and the civil war of 1946–49 added more, and by the 1960s Athens was a bustling cosmopolitan city. A construction boom from the 1950s filled the basin with apartment blocks and joined the city to Piraeus, leaving few parks, though Mount Lycabettus still rises in the middle of the city.

Old Athens survives in the Plaka on the north slope of the Acropolis, with small houses from about the time of independence, and in the streets off Monastiraki Square. Nineteenth-century Athens is seen in the Greek Revival Academy, University and National Library on Panepistimiou Street, and in the Panathenaic Stadium, restored for the 1896 Olympics. Almost all Greeks adhere to the Greek Orthodox faith, and the church, directed by a synod in Athens, kept the Greek language and traditions alive in hard times.