Athens 🇬🇷 The Oldest Neighbourhood in Europe

Around the World with Beyondia 🧵 Mediterranean Region 🪡 Episode 10

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Athens doesn’t start at the Acropolis. It starts in the backstreets of Plaka — where the alleys are older than most countries.

There is a neighbourhood in Athens called Plaka

Nobody can tell you exactly when it was founded, because founded is the wrong word for a place that was already there when founding became something people started recording. Plaka sits directly beneath the Acropolis, a tangle of narrow stepped streets, jasmine-covered walls, two-storey houses painted in colours that have no names in English, and small tavernas built into stone older than most European languages. People have lived here, uninterrupted, for more than three and a half thousand years. That is older than Homer. Older than the Parthenon, which is the thing everyone comes to see and which Plaka watched being built. It is the oldest continuously inhabited residential neighbourhood in Europe.

This matters because Athens is not really old. Athens is continuously old, which is a different thing. Rome has been the capital of an empire, ruined, abandoned for centuries, repopulated by farmers, rebuilt. London was burned, rebuilt, bombed, rebuilt. Paris was medieval then Haussmannised. Berlin was levelled. Even Istanbul was renamed. Athens has just kept going. The same city, on the same hill, speaking a version of the same language, eating a version of the same food, for something on the order of five thousand years. In the seventh century BC it was a small city-state. In the fifth century BC it invented democracy, theatre, and most of what a Western European still means by philosophy. In the Roman imperial centuries it was the university town the emperors sent their sons to. Under Byzantium it was a minor provincial town. Under the Ottomans it was a village of about ten thousand people living inside the ruins. In 1834 it became the capital of modern Greece with a population that fit in a single neighbourhood. It is now a city of three and a half million, which is more people than live in the entire country of Croatia, and it is still, fundamentally, the same city.

Climb the hill above Plaka, past the lemon trees and the cats and the stray old men arguing about football, and you reach a smaller village pressed into the rock of the Acropolis itself: Anafiotika. Cycladic white houses with blue shutters, built by stonemasons from the island of Anafi who came to Athens in the 1840s to build King Otto’s new palace and built themselves a village in their spare time — homesick for their island, they recreated it on the shoulder of the most famous rock in the world. Anafiotika has about forty houses. Most tourists walk past it without noticing. It is the quietest address in the ancient city, and it is built on top of it.

Only then does the Acropolis make sense. Fifteen columns are all that is left of the Temple of Olympian Zeus — the largest temple in ancient Greece, begun in the sixth century BC, finished seven hundred years later by the Roman emperor Hadrian in 131 AD, and now holding up a slice of the Athenian sky next to a modern highway. The Parthenon above Plaka has been a temple to Athena, an Orthodox church, a Catholic church, an Ottoman mosque, an ammunition depot, and finally a ruin — blown apart in 1687 when a Venetian mortar shell hit the gunpowder the Turks were storing inside it. The Acropolis is not the permanent thing. The neighbourhood beneath it is. Plaka has not been a temple, a church, a mosque, or a ruin. Plaka has been a place where people live.

This is what Athens teaches, if you stop trying to learn the obvious things first. The monument is the tourist. The neighbourhood is the city. The Parthenon has changed religions four times. Plaka has not. A man was selling roasted chestnuts from a cart in these streets when Byron passed through in 1810, and a man is selling roasted chestnuts from a cart in these streets tonight. They are probably related. Everyone in Plaka is probably related, somehow, to somebody who was here before the pyramids.

Athens is not the oldest city in the world. But it is the oldest city that never stopped being itself. Everything else — the columns, the democracy, the theatre, the philosophy — is what a civilisation produces when it has the rare luxury of continuity. Plaka is the engine. The Acropolis is the exhaust.

Nine regions. One hundred and twenty destinations. Three hundred and fifty-one weeks remaining.

From here, the sea. The next stop is an island.

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