Athens
Greece's capital, the cradle of Western civilization
Athens spreads across a sun-baked basin beneath the most famous rock in the world. The Acropolis rises at its center, the Parthenon's columns crowning the city as they have for two and a half millennia, while the modern metropolis of more than three million sprawls outward to the encircling mountains and down to the sea at Piraeus. Here democracy, philosophy, drama, and history as a discipline were born. Ancient ruins surface between apartment blocks, and the past and present jostle on every street.
The city occupies the Attica basin, ringed by the mountains of Hymettus, Penteli, Parnitha and Aigaleo and open to the Saronic Gulf to the southwest. The general elevation is around 70 to 130 metres, with the Acropolis rock rising to 156 metres and the conical hill of Lycabettus to 277 metres, the city's highest point. The Mediterranean climate brings hot, dry summers — among the warmest of any European capital — and mild winters, with heat sometimes trapped in the bowl-shaped basin.
Continuously inhabited for some five thousand years, Athens reached its zenith in the fifth century BCE under Pericles, when the Parthenon was raised and figures like Socrates, Plato, Sophocles, and Herodotus walked its streets. After long centuries under Roman, Byzantine, and Ottoman rule, it became the capital of the newly independent Greek state in 1834. Today Athens is the political, economic, and cultural heart of Greece, an ancient city living vigorously in the present.