106 Fun Facts About Athens

In the founding myth, Athena won patronage of the city by giving Athenians what?

The first domesticated olive tree was Athena's offering against Poseidon's gift, a salt spring in most tellings; the versions differ on who judged, but she always wins the city, and the olive gave Athenians oil, food and wood.

How do modern scholars think Athens and Athena got their matching names?

Most scholars hold that the deity was named after the place: the ending -ene is common in Greek place names but rare in personal names, and the root is probably pre-Greek.

Early Athenians wore golden hairpins shaped like which insect, said to show they were sprung from the soil itself?

Cicada pins held up the hair of rich old Athenians until shortly before Thucydides wrote, and the fashion spread to their Ionian kin; the insect's young crawl out of the ground, like the earth-born first Athenians.

Who introduced democracy to Athens in 508 BC?

Cleisthenes broke the hold of the old clans by sorting citizens into ten new tribes based on where they lived, not on family ties; Solon's reforms had opened the way decades earlier.

Which Athenian general led the victory over the Persians at Marathon in 490 BC?

Miltiades talked the war-archon Callimachus into casting the deciding vote for battle when the ten generals split evenly; Themistocles' naval win at Salamis came ten years later.

Which Athenian statesman launched the public works that produced the Parthenon?

Pericles, Athens' leading statesman for some three decades, spent the Delian League's funds, paid in by allies for defence against Persia, on rebuilding the Acropolis.

What was ostracism in Athenian democracy?

Ostracism meant exiling citizens seen as threats to the state for ten years: voters scratched a name on a clay shard, an ostrakon, and the man with the most votes left but kept his property.

Which sculptor oversaw the Parthenon's decoration and made the gold-and-ivory statue of Athena that stood inside?

Phidias directed the temple's sculptors and made the towering Athena himself; enemies of his political patron later accused him of stealing gold meant for the statue.

What does the name of Athens' Acropolis literally mean in Greek?

High city is the sense of akron, 'top', plus polis: many Greek towns had one as a refuge, and the rock in Athens was a Mycenaean king's fortress centuries before it became a sanctuary.

What is the monumental gateway at the western end of the Acropolis called?

The Propylaea, designed by Mnesicles, was begun in 437 BC and never finished: work stopped as the Peloponnesian War broke out and was not taken up again.

What name is given to the sculpted female figures that serve as columns on the Erechtheion's porch?

Caryatids are columns carved as draped women; the six on the building today are copies, since Lord Elgin's agents carried one original off and the other five now stand in the Acropolis Museum.

During the Venetian siege of 1687, what was the Parthenon being used as?

An Ottoman munitions store filled the Parthenon, by then a mosque, when Morosini's Venetians shelled the Acropolis; a mortar shell set it off, and the blast took the roof and most of the walls.

Which Romantic poet condemned Elgin's removal of the Parthenon sculptures in his poem 'The Curse of Minerva'?

Lord Byron wrote the satire in Athens in 1811, casting Elgin as a plunderer; Elgin's agents had removed about half the surviving sculptures, which Parliament bought from him in 1816.

Which Roman emperor finally completed Athens' Temple of Olympian Zeus, begun more than six centuries earlier?

Hadrian dedicated the Temple of Olympian Zeus around AD 131; the tyrants who began it in the 6th century BC were driven out with little more than the base laid, and the project sat abandoned for generations.

Which emperor's 529 ban on pagan philosophy teaching is usually taken as the end of ancient Athens?

Justinian I's edict of 529 banned pagans from teaching, closing the Neoplatonic Academy in Athens; the city had remained a philosophical centre that had taught the future emperor Julian.

Which sultan captured Athens in 1458 and ordered its ancient monuments protected?

Mehmed II, conqueror of Constantinople five years earlier, is said to have been struck by the beauty of Athens' antiquities; the Parthenon, a church for centuries, was later converted into a mosque.

Athens replaced which city as capital of independent Greece in 1834?

Nafplio, a fortified port in the Peloponnese, was the seat of the new Greek kingdom until 1834, when the government moved to Athens, chosen for its classical past though war had left it a small town.

Greece's first king, who commissioned a modern city plan for Athens, came from which country?

Bavaria sent its king's 17-year-old son Otto to be Greece's first monarch, with Bavarian regents governing for him at first; Greeks deposed him in 1862 and took a Danish prince as George I.

The Panathenaic Stadium is the only stadium in the world built entirely of what?

Marble throughout earned the stadium its nickname Kallimarmaro, 'beautiful marble'; abandoned and buried for centuries, it was dug out by archaeologists and rebuilt for the 1896 Olympics with money from Georgios Averoff.

Winners at the 1896 Athens Olympics were not given gold, so their first-place medal was made of which metal?

Silver went to each winner in 1896 and copper to the runner-up; the gold-silver-bronze order dates from St. Louis in 1904, and the IOC later relabelled the 1896 results to match.

Which Greek won the marathon at the 1896 Olympics, to the delight of the home crowd?

Spyridon Louis, a water-carrier from Marousi, entered the stadium first and ran his last lap flanked by two Greek princes; fellow Greek Charilaos Vasilakos came in second.

The marathon race takes its name from the legend of which Greek messenger?

Pheidippides is the name the satirist Lucian, some six centuries later, gives the runner who died announcing the victory; Herodotus has him run the other way, to Sparta, to seek help before the battle.

Athens and its port of Piraeus lie on the shore of which gulf?

The Saronic Gulf, an arm of the Aegean, holds the island of Salamis, in whose narrow straits the outnumbered Greek fleet beat the Persian navy in 480 BC.

Which architect crowned the Athens Olympic Stadium with twin steel arches and a suspended roof for the 2004 Games?

Santiago Calatrava's two steel arches span 304 m and carry a roof of 5,000 polycarbonate panels; built to one side and slid into place, it was finished just in time for the 2004 Games.

Which song style, spread through Athens by the 1922 refugees from Asia Minor, became the basis of Greek popular music?

Rebetiko, the music of port taverns and the cafés of Smyrna, took root in the poor districts where the refugees settled; songwriters such as Vassilis Tsitsanis later smoothed it into the laiko pop that followed.

What are the kilted Greek presidential guards outside Parliament at Syntagma called?

Evzones of the Presidential Guard wear the pleated fustanella kilt and pom-pommed tsarouchia shoes, a uniform recalling the mountain fighters of the War of Independence; they change guard at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.

Which hill is the highest point in central Athens at 277 m?

Lycabettus rises to 277 m; myth says Athena dropped the rock there while carrying it to fortify the Acropolis, and a funicular climbs to the chapel of St George on its summit.

Which mountain on the edge of Athens was quarried for the white stone of the Parthenon?

Mount Pentelicus, northeast of the city, supplied the temple's fine white stone; traces of iron in it have oxidised over the centuries, giving the Parthenon its soft honey colour.

Plaka, below the Acropolis, is described as what?

Plaka is the oldest district of Athens, built over the houses of the ancient city; on its upper edge, Anafiotika was built like a Cycladic island village by 19th-century settlers from Anafi.

Stavros Niarchos, whose foundation paid for Athens' Renzo Piano-designed cultural center, made his fortune in which industry?

Shipping made Stavros Niarchos one of Greece's great tycoons; the foundation he left funded the cultural center, home to the national library and opera, and gave it to the Greek state in 2017.

Line 1 of today's Athens Metro opened in 1869 with trains powered by what?

Steam hauled the first trains between Piraeus and Thiseio in 1869; the line went electric in 1904, and nearly a century passed before Lines 2 and 3 joined it in 2000.

Athens International Airport, opened in 2001, is named after which statesman?

Eleftherios Venizelos, the prime minister under whom Greece doubled its territory in the Balkan Wars, gives his name to the airport that replaced seaside Ellinikon in March 2001.

Plaster copies in the Acropolis Museum's Parthenon Gallery stand in for sculptures held mainly by which foreign museum?

The British Museum holds the largest share of the absent pieces; Bernard Tschumi's 2009 building turns its glass-walled top floor to the temple's exact orientation, in full view of the Parthenon itself.

Which Athens institution holds the world's largest collection of ancient Greek antiquities?

The National Archaeological Museum holds treasures such as the gold Mask of Agamemnon; when war reached Greece in 1940, its staff boxed the antiquities and buried them to keep them from bombs and looters.

Elefsina, just west of Athens, held which official European weather record from 1977 until 2021?

Highest temperature: Elefsina's 48.0 °C of July 1977 stood until a station near Syracuse in Sicily logged 48.8 °C in August 2021, a reading the World Meteorological Organization confirmed only in 2024, after an expert panel had checked it.

Which two clubs, from Athens and Piraeus, are the 'eternal enemies' of Greek football?

Panathinaikos and Olympiacos have long been cast as opposites, the club of old, well-off Athens against the team of the working-class port of Piraeus, a divide that gave the derby its edge.

Which hero's forgotten black sail led his father, King Aegeus of Athens, to leap to his death?

Theseus had promised to hoist a white sail if he survived the Minotaur; Aegeus saw black, despaired and jumped, in one telling into the sea that Greeks said took the name Aegean from him.

The National Garden of Athens, completed in 1840, lies between Parliament and which building?

The Zappeion, built with the benefactor Evangelis Zappas's money for the Olympic revival, served as the fencing hall of the 1896 Games; the garden beside it was laid out for Queen Amalia.

What was Athens's population when it became capital in 1834?

Athens had only about 4,000 to 5,000 inhabitants when the capital moved there in 1834; the War of Independence had left it a huddle of houses at the foot of the Acropolis.

After Athens, which is the next most southerly capital city on the European mainland?

Lisbon lies at about 38.7° north, under one degree above Athens and well south of Madrid and Rome; Valletta and Nicosia sit further south than either, but on the islands of Malta and Cyprus.

At his trial in 399 BC, which philosopher told the Athenian jury his fitting penalty was free meals at public expense?

Socrates, found guilty of impiety and corrupting the young, said he deserved free dinners in the Prytaneum, an honour kept for Olympic victors; the jury chose death instead, and he drank hemlock.

Athens was the first city to hold which European title, launched in 1985 at the urging of Melina Mercouri?

European Capital of Culture began as the idea of Mercouri, the film star turned Greek minister, and her French counterpart Jack Lang; UNESCO later named Athens its World Book Capital for 2018.

What was the official motto of the 2004 Athens Olympics?

Welcome Home marked the Games' return to their birthplace: the organising chief greeted the opening ceremony with 'Olympic Games, welcome home!', and the shot put was staged in the ancient stadium at Olympia.

The pedestrian archaeological walk through Athens ends just past which sanctuary in Thiseio?

The Temple of Hephaestus, on a rise above the ancient Agora, is one of the best-preserved temples in the Greek world, kept whole by centuries of use as a church; the walk to it begins at the Temple of Olympian Zeus.

On which hill did the ancient Athenian citizens' Assembly, the Ekklesia, meet?

The Ekklesia met on the Pnyx, a hill west of the Acropolis, where a rock-cut platform, the bema, served as the speakers' stand; orators such as Demosthenes addressed the citizens there.

Which bird appeared on the coins of ancient Athens and still features on Greece's one-euro coin?

The owl, Athena's bird, was stamped on so many Athenian coins that Greeks nicknamed them 'owls', and 'bringing owls to Athens' became a proverb for a pointless errand.

Athens lost its bid to host the 1996 Summer Olympics to which city?

Atlanta beat Athens by 51 votes to 35 in the final round in 1990, denying the first modern host the centenary Games; Athens bid again and in 1997 won the 2004 Olympics.

Kerameikos, the ancient cemetery district of Athens, was also the working quarter of which craftsmen?

Potters gave the district its trade, and the Greek word for their clay, keramos, lies behind the English word ceramic; the city's main burial ground lay beside their workshops, by the Dipylon Gate.

Which American-born soprano settled in Athens in 1937 and debuted with the Greek National Opera?

Maria Callas, born in New York to Greek parents, was 13 when her mother took her to Athens, where she trained under Elvira de Hidalgo; after her death in 1977 her ashes were scattered in the Aegean.

Which ancient venue below the Acropolis became the main stage of the Athens Festival after its 1950s restoration?

The Odeon of Herodes Atticus was built around AD 161 by a rich Athenian in memory of his wife Regilla; it lost its cedar roof a century later and stood in ruins until the 1950s restoration.

Athens became the first European city to create which post in response to rising temperatures?

A chief heat officer, Eleni Myrivili, took up the new post in July 2021 to prepare Athens for severe heat waves; a year later the United Nations named her its first global chief heat officer.

The 'Athens Trilogy' on Panepistimiou Street comprises the Academy, the National Library and what?

The old University campus came first, begun in 1839 to a design by the Dane Christian Hansen; his brother Theophil then flanked it with the Academy and the National Library to complete the set.

Along with the Cephissus and the Ilisos, which stream is counted among the historical rivers of Athens?

The Eridanos, a small stream that flowed through the ancient Agora and out through the Kerameikos district, was channelled underground in antiquity; its bed was uncovered during construction of Monastiraki metro station.

Which philosopher founded the Lyceum, the Athens school unearthed in 1996?

Aristotle, a foreigner who could not own property in Athens, rented buildings in the Lyceum grove for his school in 335 BC; the Roman general Sulla wrecked the site in 86 BC.

Which Persian king watched the Battle of Salamis from below Mount Aigaleo?

Xerxes sat beneath Mount Aigaleo, the ridge west of Athens, with scribes noting which captains fought well; after the defeat in the straits he went home to Asia with much of his army.

AEK, founded by refugees from Constantinople, named its 2022 stadium after which landmark there?

Hagia Sophia gives its name to AEK's Agia Sophia stadium in Nea Filadelfeia; the club's old ground there was demolished in 2003 after earthquake damage, leaving AEK without a home of its own for nearly two decades.

Which Shakespeare comedy of quarrelling fairies and runaway lovers is set in Athens and a nearby forest?

A Midsummer Night's Dream opens at the Athenian court before its lovers flee to the woods, where the fairy king and queen are feuding over a changeling boy.

Mount Hymettus, the 16 km ridge that runs from Athens to the sea, has long been noted for which food?

Honey scented with thyme made Hymettus famous, and Athenians still nickname the winding ridge Trellovouno, the crazy mountain.

Syntagma Square in central Athens is named after which document that King Otto was forced to grant in 1843?

A constitution was what soldiers and crowds gathered to demand on 3 September 1843, and the square where they stood took the Greek word for it, syntagma, as its name.

Which geared bronze device, raised from a shipwreck in 1901 and kept in Athens, is called the first analogue computer?

The Antikythera mechanism used at least 30 meshing bronze gears to follow the Sun and Moon through the zodiac and predict eclipses decades ahead.

Which Athenian lawgiver's code, punishing even cabbage theft with death, gave English a word for extreme harshness?

Draco set down the first written laws of Athens around 621 BC, and the adjective draconian still describes needlessly severe rules.

Which NBA Most Valuable Player grew up in the Sepolia neighbourhood of Athens, hawking watches and sunglasses?

Giannis Antetokounmpo was born in Athens to Nigerian parents, won back-to-back NBA MVP awards in 2019 and 2020 and was named Finals MVP in 2021.

Which event of the 2004 Athens Olympics was held at ancient Olympia, site of the original Olympic Games?

Shot put brought competition back to ancient Olympia, where American Kristin Heaston became the first woman ever to compete at the site.

Which capital city's neoclassical buildings and reputation for learning earned it the nickname 'Athens of the North'?

Edinburgh took the comparison seriously enough to model its National Monument on Calton Hill directly on the Parthenon.

Which occupying power's flag did two young Greeks tear down from the Acropolis of Athens on 30 May 1941?

Nazi Germany's flag had flown there for a month when Manolis Glezos and Apostolos Santas climbed up and tore it down, an act that inspired resistance across occupied Europe.

Which rival city-state starved Athens into surrender in 404 BC, ending the 27-year Peloponnesian War?

Sparta's siege left Athens facing starvation and disease, and the peace terms made the city tear down the Long Walls that tied it to its harbour.

Which apostle's sermon in Athens, set on the Areopagus in the Book of Acts, cited an altar to an unknown god?

Paul seized on the altar as his opening line, and the rocky hill where the speech is set takes its name from Ares, the god of war.

Which philosopher founded the Academy around 387 BC in a sacred grove outside the walls of Athens?

Plato taught on ground named for the hero Akademos, and a late legend says a sign over the door barred anyone untrained in geometry.

Which French aristocrat created the IOC at the 1894 Paris congress that chose Athens for the first modern Olympics?

Pierre de Coubertin had suggested holding the revival alongside the 1900 Paris world's fair, but the congress he organised settled on Athens and an earlier date.

Which neighbourhood in the old town of Athens is a flea market quarter and a magnet for bargain shopping?

Monastiraki means 'little monastery', after the church on its square, and its lanes of souvenir and specialty shops fan out from the metro stop of the same name.

The ancient theatre built into the south slope of the Acropolis of Athens belonged to the sanctuary of which god?

Dionysus was honoured there at the City Dionysia, the festival where Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides competed for the tragedy prize.

Which Renaissance artist painted 'The School of Athens', a Vatican fresco crowded with Greek philosophers?

Raphael slipped his own self-portrait into the crowd, and one of the central sages is believed to wear the face of Leonardo da Vinci.

Democratic Athens filled its council of 500 and most of its public offices each year by which method?

Drawing lots picked the 500 councillors afresh every year with the help of an allotment device called a kleroterion, while a few posts such as the ten generals stayed elected.

Which American swimmer, aged 19, won six gold medals and two bronze at the 2004 Athens Olympics?

Michael Phelps left Athens with eight medals in all, tying the record for the most won by anyone at a single Games.

The Athens building that became the home of the Hellenic Parliament was originally constructed as what?

A royal palace for King Otto, it went up between 1836 and 1843 and was devastated by fire in 1909 before the deputies moved in.

Which Cynic philosopher sheltered in a large ceramic jar in Athens and carried a lit lantern in daylight?

Diogenes begged for a living and slept in the storage jar, and the Athenians reportedly liked him enough to replace it when a youth broke it.

In Athens, where 'souvlaki' can mean any pita wrap, which word do locals use for the meat skewer itself?

Kalamaki means 'small reed', and the word marks out Athens from northern Greece, where the same skewer is simply called souvlaki.

Which comedy by Aristophanes, first staged in Athens in 411 BC, has women refuse sex until the men make peace?

Lysistrata, whose name means 'army disbander', also has its heroine seize the Acropolis, and it was staged while the long war it mocks was still being fought.

Which Athenian orator is said to have overcome a stammer by practising speeches with pebbles in his mouth?

Demosthenes went on to aim most of his major speeches at the growing power of Philip II of Macedon, attacks still known as the Philippics.

Triremes, the warships that made ancient Athens a naval power, took their name from having three of what?

Rows of oars on three levels, pulled by 170 rowers with one man to each oar, were what drove a trireme through the water.

Which visiting nation won the most events at the 1896 Athens Olympics, though host Greece took more medals overall?

United States athletes won 11 events, yet host Greece went home with the most medals overall, 47.

Ermou Street, the best-known and busiest shopping street in central Athens, is named after which Greek god?

Hermes Street runs for a kilometre and a half from Syntagma Square, and one of the city's most venerable Byzantine churches, Kapnikarea, sits in a small square in the middle of its pedestrian zone.

Which excavator of Troy unearthed the gold 'Mask of Agamemnon' at Mycenae in 1876, now a star exhibit in Athens?

Heinrich Schliemann believed he had found the king who led the Greeks at Troy, but research suggests the mask is 300 to 400 years older than any such war.

Which Athenian politician persuaded the city in 483 BC to build a great fleet of triremes to face Persia?

Themistocles carried the vote against Aristides, who wanted a windfall from the state mines at Laurion shared out among the people instead.

Which Athenian general and historian caught the plague of 430 BC himself and later described it in his history?

Thucydides was later exiled for failing to save the city of Amphipolis, and used his twenty years away to watch the war from both sides.

Which Italian club beat Liverpool 2–1 in the 2007 Champions League final at the Olympic Stadium in Athens?

AC Milan won with two goals from Filippo Inzaghi, two years after losing a final to the same opponents from three goals up at half-time.

The alliance Athens led against Persia from 478 BC takes its modern name from which island, its official meeting place?

Delos, sacred to Apollo, hosted the league's congresses inside his sanctuary, and the common treasury sat there too until it was moved to Athens in 454 BC.

The Sacred Way began at a gate in the Kerameikos of Athens and led initiates of the Mysteries to which town?

Eleusis held yearly initiations into the cult of Demeter and Persephone, the most famous secret rites of ancient Greece.

Which tiny white-walled neighbourhood on the Acropolis slope in Athens was built by island workers in Cycladic style?

Anafiotika takes its name from Anafi, the island its first builders left to find construction work in the new capital, and only 45 of its houses remain.

Which Athens hill, once the Hill of the Muses, now bears the name of a prince of Commagene entombed there?

Philopappos was so mourned at his death in 116 AD that his sister Julia Balbilla and the people of Athens raised his tomb in full view of the Acropolis.

Which island, 27 km from Athens, is known today for its pistachio crop and its temple of Aphaia?

Aegina is also traditionally credited as the first city-state in Europe to issue coins, the Aeginetic staters.

The Gazi neighbourhood of Athens, now a nightlife hub, grew up around which kind of industrial plant?

A gasworks founded in 1857 gave the area its character, and since 1999 its buildings have been the Technopolis industrial museum and concert venue.

A tank crashing through the gates of which Athens institution ended the anti-junta student revolt of November 1973?

The Polytechnic revolt ended in bloodshed on 17 November, but it opened the string of crises that brought down the military junta the following summer.

Which band of mercenaries killed the Duke of Athens in battle in 1311 and seized his duchy for themselves?

The Catalan Company turned on Walter of Brienne when he tried to dismiss them unpaid, and Athens stayed under Catalan rule until 1388.

Which architect designed the Acropolis Museum in Athens, opened in 2009 with glass floors over live excavations?

Bernard Tschumi won the fourth design competition held for the building, working with the Greek architect Michael Photiadis.

Which Roman general besieged and sacked Athens in 86 BC after the city revolted in support of Mithridates?

Sulla even felled the sacred trees of the Academy to build his siege engines, though he halted the sack out of regard for the Athenians of old.

The Parthenon's west pediment showed Athena's quarrel with which god over who would be patron of Athens?

Poseidon, in one telling, struck the ground with his trident and brought up a salt-water spring as his rival gift to the city.

The Parthenon, with eight columns across each end, is the best-known temple of which Greek architectural order?

Doric temples typically have six columns across each end, so the Parthenon's eight make it unusually wide for the style.

Which phobia takes its name from the Greek word for a city's central gathering place and market, as in Athens?

Agoraphobia was coined in 1871 by the German psychologist Karl Westphal from agora, the Greek word for a place of assembly or marketplace.

Which school of philosophy is named after the painted colonnade in the Agora of Athens where its founder taught?

Stoicism began with Zeno of Citium, who taught from around 300 BC in the Stoa Poikile, a public porch decorated with scenes of mythic and historical battles.

Which octagonal building in the Roman Agora of Athens combined sundials with a water clock?

The Tower of the Winds is named for the eight wind gods carved around its top, and it is the only clock tower to survive from classical antiquity.

The carved metopes on the Parthenon's south side show the Lapiths of Thessaly fighting which mythical creatures?

Centaurs battle the Lapiths along the south side, while the east metopes pit the Olympian gods against the Giants and the west show Athenians fighting Amazons.

What name is given to the slight swelling of the Parthenon's columns, which then narrow toward the top?

Entasis had been used since the mid-6th century BC, but on the Parthenon it is unusually subtle, a swelling of roughly one part in 550 to 600.

The 160-metre sculpted frieze that ran around the Parthenon is most widely thought to depict which event?

The Panathenaic procession ran from the Dipylon Gate up to the Acropolis, and the frieze is often read as ending with the presentation of Athena's robe, the peplos.

Which Hellenistic king built the two-storey colonnade in the Athenian Agora that was rebuilt in the 1950s as its museum?

Attalos II of Pergamon gave Athens the 115-metre building in the second century BC, and the American School of Classical Studies rebuilt it between 1952 and 1956.

Which architect do ancient sources name, alongside Callicrates, as co-designer of the Parthenon in Athens?

Ictinus also co-wrote a book about the project, now lost, and is credited with the Temple of Apollo at Bassae.