Athens Travel Guide

Athens is the historic city and capital of Greece. Many of Classical civilization’s intellectual and artistic ideas originated there, and the city is generally considered to be the birthplace of Western civilization.

Athens, with its tall buildings and contemporary shops, is the first European city when approached from the Middle East. When approached from the west, from elsewhere in Europe, what strikes the visitor is the influence of the East—in the food, music, and clamorous street life—perhaps vestiges of a time when Athens was divorced from European society under the yoke of Ottoman rule. Nevertheless, it is wrong to say that Athens is a mixture of East and West: it is Greek and, more particularly, Athenian. The city, after all, nurtured Western civilization thousands of years ago. Athens remains on the world stage to this day.

With its urban area’s population numbering over 3.6 million, it is the eighth largest urban area in the European Union. The Municipality of Athens (also City of Athens), which constitutes a small administrative unit of the entire urban area, has a population of 643,452 within its official limits, and a land area of 38.96 km