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History
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Athens has been inhabited continuously for over 7000 years. Its acropolis, supplied with spring water, commanding views of all seaward approaches and encircled by protective mountains on its landward side, was a natural choice for prehistoric settlement and for the Mycenaeans, who established a palace-fortress on the rock. Its development into a city-state and artistic centre continued apace under the Dorians, Phoenicians and various dynastic rulers, reaching its apotheosis in the fifth century BC. This was the
Classical period
, when the Athenians, having launched themselves into an experiment in radical democracy, celebrated their success with a flourish of art, architecture, literature and philosophy that has influenced Western culture ever since.
The discontinuity from ancient to medieval Athens was due, essentially, to the emergence of Christianity . Having survived with little change through years of Roman rule, the city lost its pivotal role in the Roman-Greek world after the division of the Roman Empire into Eastern and Western halves, and the establishment of Byzantium (Constantinople) as capital of the Eastern - Byzantine - empire. There, a new Christian sensibility soon outshone the prevailing ethic of Athens, where schools of philosophy continued to teach a pagan Neoplatonism. In 529 these schools were finally closed by Justinian I, and the city's temples, including the Parthenon, were reconsecrated as churches. Athens rarely featured in the chronicles of the time, enjoying a brief revival under the foreign powers of the Middle Ages: in the aftermath of the piratical Fourth Crusade, Athens - together with the Peloponnese and much of central Greece - passed into the hands of the Franks . At the Acropolis they established a ducal court (of some magnificence, according to contemporary accounts) and for a century Athens was back in the mainstream of Europe. Frankish control, however, was based on little more than a provincial aristocracy. In 1311 their forces battled Catalan mercenaries, who had a stronghold in Thebes, and were driven to oblivion in a swamp. The Catalans, having set up their own duchy, in turn gave way to Florentines and, briefly, Venetians, before the arrival in 1456 of Sultan Mehmet II , the Turkish conqueror of Constantinople. Turkish Athens was never much more than a garrison town. The links with the West, which had preserved a sense of continuity with the Classical and Roman city, were severed, and the flood of visitors was reduced to a trickle of French and Italian ambassadors to the Sublime Porte, and the occasional traveller or painter. The town does not seem to have been oppressed by Ottoman rule, however: the Greeks enjoyed some autonomy, and both Jesuit and Capuchin monasteries continued to thrive. Although the Acropolis became the home of the Turkish governor and the Parthenon was used as a mosque, life in the village-like quarters around the Acropolis drifted back to a semi-rural existence. Similarly, the great port of PireA?s , still partially enclosed within its ancient walls, was left to serve just a few dozen fishing boats. Four centuries of Ottoman occupation followed until, in 1821, in common with the inhabitants of a score of other towns across the country, the Greeks of Athens rose in rebellion . They occupied the Turkish quarters of the lower town - the current PlA?ka - and laid siege to the Acropolis. The Turks withdrew, but five years later were back to reoccupy the Acropolis fortifications, while the Greeks evacuated to the countryside. When the Ottoman garrison finally left in 1834, and the Bavarian architects of the new German-born monarchy moved in, Athens, with a population of only 5000, was at its nadir. For all the claims of its ancient past, and despite the city's natural advantages, Athens was not the first-choice capital of modern Greece. That honour went instead to NA?fplio in the Peloponnese, where the War of Independence was masterminded by Kapodistrias and where the first Greek National Assembly met in 1828. Had Kapodistrias not been assassinated, in 1831, the capital would most likely have remained in the Peloponnese, if not at NA?fplio, then at TrApoli, Corinth or PA?tra, all much more established and sizeable towns. But following Kapodistrias's death, the "Great Powers" of Western Europe intervened, inflicting on the Greeks a king of their own choosing - Otho , son of Ludwig I of Bavaria - and, in 1834, transferring the capital and court to Athens. The reasoning was almost purely symbolic and sentimental: Athens was not only insignificant in terms of population and physical extent but was then at the edge of the territories of the new Greek state, which had yet to include northern Thessaly, Epirus or Macedonia, or any of the islands beyond the Cyclades or Sporades. The nineteenth-century development of Athens was a gradual and fairly controlled process. While the archeologists stripped away all the Turkish and Frankish embellishments from the Acropolis, a modest city took shape along the lines of the Bavarians' Neoclassical grid. PireA?s , meanwhile, grew into a port again, though until the nineteenth century, its activities continued to be dwarfed by the main Greek shipping centres on the islands of Syros and A?dhra (Hydra). The first mass expansion of both municipalities came suddenly, in 1923, as the result of the tragic Greek-Turkish war in Asia Minor . The peace treaty that resolved the war entailed the exchange of Greek and Turkish ethnic populations, their identity being determined solely on the basis of religion. A million and a half Greeks, mostly from the age-old settlements along the Asia Minor coast, but also many Turkish-speaking peoples from the communities of inland Anatolia, arrived in Greece as refugees. Over half of them settled in Athens, PireA?s and the neighbouring villages, changing at a stroke the whole make-up of the capital. Their integration and survival is one of the great events of the city's history, and has left its mark on the Athens of today. The web of suburbs that straddles the metro line from Athens to PireA?s, and sprawls out into the hills, bears nostalgic names of the refugees' origins - NAŠa Smyrni (New Smyrna), NAŠa IA?nia, NAŠa FiladhAŠlfia - as do many streets. Originally, these neighbourhoods were basically refugee villages with populations primarily from one or another Anatolian town, built in ramshackle fashion, often with a single water source for two dozen families. The merging of these shanty-suburbs and their populations with the established communities of Athens and PireA?s dominated the years leading up to World War II . With the war, however, new concerns emerged. Athens was hit hard by German occupation: during the winter of 1941-2 there were an estimated 2000 deaths from starvation each day. In late 1944, when the Germans finally left (Allied policy was to tie them down in the Balkans), the capital saw the first skirmishes of civil war , with the British forces being ordered to fight against their former Greek allies in the Communist-dominated resistance army, ELAS. Physical evidence of the ensuing month-long battle, the DhekemvrianA? , can still be seen in a handful of bullet-pocked walls. From 1946 to 1949 Athens was a virtual island in the civil war, with road approaches to the Peloponnese and the north only tenuously kept open. But during the 1950s, after the civil war, the city started to expand rapidly. A massive industrial investment programme - financed largely by the Americans, who had won Greece for their sphere of influence - took place, and the capital saw huge immigration from the war-torn, impoverished countryside. The open spaces between the old refugee suburbs began to fill and, by the late 1960s, Greater Athens covered a continuous area from the slopes of mounts PendAŠli and PA?rnitha down to PireA?s and ElefsAna. On a visual level, much of the modern city is unremittingly ugly, since old buildings were demolished wholesale in the name of quick-buck development, particularly during the colonels' junta of 1967-74. Only now are planning and preservation measures being enforced - in a last-ditch attempt to rescue the city from its engulfing pollution . The PASOK administration of the late 1980s endowed the city with thousands of trees, shrubs, patches of garden and an ever-growing number of pedestrian-only streets - though Athens still lags far behind Paris or London in terms of open space. There is also increasing awareness of the nineteenth-century architectural heritage - what's left of it - with many old houses being restored and repainted.
Long-term solutions
are proving more elusive: priorities include decanting industry and services into the provinces to ease the stresses on the city's environment and its ailing infrastructure, and creating a mass transport network capable of meeting the needs of a modern capital city. Other useful information
for tourists (each section contains more specific sub-sections): |
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Greece,
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