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Achilleas Hotel
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A tastefully decorated and well appointed superior 3 star hotel quietly located in the centre of...
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Greece: Search for areas
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Athens
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Description
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Pictures
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Athens is the capital of Greece, and of the Attica prefecture of Greece.
Athens was the leading city in Greece during the greatest period of Greek civilization during the 1st millennium BC. During the "Golden Age" of Greece (roughly 500 BC to 300 BC) it was the Western world's leading cultural and intellectual center, and indeed it is in the ideas and practices of ancient Athens that what we now call "Western civilization" has its origins. After its days of greatness, Athens continued to be a prosperous city and a centre of learning until the late Roman period.
The schools of philosophy, however, were closed in AD 529 by the Christian Byzantine Empire who disapproved of the schools' pagan thinking. During the Byzantine era, Athens was gradually losing a great deal of status and, by the time of the Crusades, it was already reduced to a provincial town. It faced a crushing blow between the 13th and 15th centuries, when the city was fought over by the Greek Byzantines and the French and Italian Crusaders. In 1458 the city fell to the Ottoman Empire and the city's population went into decline and conditions worsened as the Ottoman Empire declined as well starting in the late XVIII Century.
The city was inhabited by just 5,000 people by the time it was made the capital of the newly established kingdom of Greece in 1833. During the next few decades the city was rebuilt into a modern city applying mainly to the Neoclassic style. In 1896 Athens was the host city of the 1896 Summer Olympics.The next large expansion occurred in the 1920s when suburbs were created to house Greek refugees from Asia Minor. During World War II the city was occupied by Germany and fared badly in the war's later years. After the war the city started to grow again.
Athens has been a tourist destination since ancient times. Visitors from all over the world have always been very eager to visit the famed monuments of the Acropolis. Over the past eight years, the infrastructure and social amenities of Athens have been transformed as a result of the city's successful bid to stage the 2004 Olympic Games.
Most importantly from the point of view of tourism, the area around the Acropolis has been remodelled, and a great pedestrian area from the Temple of Olympian Zeus to Plaka, Monastiraki and the Psirri has been constructed. This gives the visitor space for calm walks among the ancient monuments, ruins and trees, from the Acropolis, to the Agora (the meeting place of the ancient city) and then to the narrow streets of the old city of Athens (the Plaka), away from the noise of the modern city. Close to Syntagma Square (described above) is the Kallimarmaro Stadium, the place where the first modern Olympic Games took place in 1896. Built as a replica of the ancient Athens Stadium, it is interesting, not only for romantic reasons but also because it is probably the only major stadium (holding 60,000 spectators) made entirely of white marble.
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