Athens and Beyond

One of the most ancient cities of the world, Athens Greece is famous as the birthplace of democracy.
With a history of over 3,000 years, Athens is the best town for sightseeing. According to the myth, the city took its name after Athena, the Goddess of Wisdom and daughter of Zeus. She was the protector of the city and in fact, the temple of Parthenon on the Acropolis is dedicated to her. The first traces of Athens date from the Mycenaean period, while it reached its peak after at the 5th century BC, known as the Golden Century of Pericles, the Athenian statesman who has inspired so many innovations for his homeland and led it to its glory. From as early as the 8th century BC, Athens was gradually developing into an important city-state for Greece, giving emphasis on culture and its naval power. But it was in the 5th century BC when great political formations were made, new buildings were constructed, including the Acropolis, the Temple of Poseidon at Sounion, and the Ancient Agora, and victorious imperials wars took place so that Athens would obtain new economical sources. However, after the Peloponnesian War and the defeat from Sparta, Athens started to decline. In the 2nd century BC, it was conquered by the Romans and gained some of its old glory, but in Byzantine times, the city was frequently raided by northern tribes and fell into decline again.

Character of the city

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.

The city plan

In 1833 there was almost no Athens at all. During the fight for independence, it had been entirely evacuated in 1827, and six years later it held perhaps 4,000 people in the straggle of little houses on the north slope below the Acropolis. The newly imported king of the Hellenes, Otto, the 18-year-old son of Louis I of Bavaria, was installed in the only two-story stone house, while his German architects hurried ahead with plans for a palace and a new Athens far out in the fields.

The Acropolis of Athens

Many of Athens’s bequests (all, if the theatre of Herodes Atticus may be regarded as an embodiment of the city’s literature) to the world are expressed in and around the natural centre of Athens, the Acropolis (designated a World Heritage site in 1987). Rising some 500 feet above sea level, with springs near the base and a single approach, the Acropolis was an obvious choice of citadel and sanctuary from earliest times. That it could be something more is evidenced in the Parthenon, one of the brightest jewels in humankind’s, let alone Athens’s, treasury. As deceptively simple as Socrates’ conversation, this columned, oblong temple is the expression—without a trace of strain or conflict—of a human ideal of clarity and unity. The architectural genius is concentrated in the exterior, for within was a shelter for the goddess Athena—the patroness who lent her name to the city—not a place for mass worship. Its spiritual quality, the sensation of being almost afloat, is enhanced by the lack of a single straight vertical line in the peristyle (the surrounding colonnade); each vertical is almost imperceptibly bowed, theoretically meeting some 11,500 feet in the sky. The columns, of diminishing thickness toward the centre of the colonnade, with diminishing space between them, lean toward the centre, too; all these differences are virtually invisible to the beholder. Even the 20 flutings of each column diminish in width as they rise, and the humblest details of craftsmanship are perfect.