Athens is the capital and the largest city of Greece. With over 3400 years of history, it is one of the oldest cities in the world. The ancient city of Athens was a strong city where the connection to the sea and the maritime trade was realized through the port city of Piraeus, which is part of Athens today. Piraeus is now home to Greece’s most important transportation port. In the history of the civilizations, the breakthroughs realized in the city of Athens especially in the fields of ancient philosophy and art are of great importance.
Athens hosts the Academy of Plato and the likeyum of Aristotales. Due to the unique contribution of Athens to the world culture, Western civilizations have tended to associate themselves with the civilization of Athens, at times when the eastern civilizations lived their golden ages. Modern Athens is a city where ancient, Roman, Byzantine and Ottoman periods’ and modern times structures and cultures live together. It is possible to see that the structures belonging to these periods exist together in harmony in the city. Athens is the political, cultural and financial capital of Greece. The daily life, shaken for a while by the recent economic crisis that deeply affected Greece, has returned to normal by 2012. As of in 2012, Athens is the 39th richest city in the world. The city center of Athens has a population of 664 thousand. The population of Athens, along with Piraeus and other regions, is close to 4 million. It is the fourth most populous capital in the European Union.
You can almost feel the historical heritage of this ancient city. Parthenon is the most famous of the works remaining from this period. Apart from the Parthenon it is possible to find important structures dating from the Ottoman, Byzantine and Roman periods. The two UNESCO world heritage sites in Athens are the Acropolis of Athens and the Dafni Monastery. The Hellenic parliament, built in the 19th century, and the National Library of Greece, the Athens Triad, the University of Athens, and the Athens Academy are the best examples of modern trends. In 1896 Athens also hosted the first modern Olympics. The Modern Archeology Museum in Athens has the largest collection of ancient Greek artifacts in the world. The new Acropolis museum is one of which you should definitely see in Athens.
