Getting Around The Suburbs of Athens City

Pangrati & Mets - Surrounding the reconstructed Athens Stadium known to the Greeks as Kallimarmaro (Beautiful Marble), where the first modern Olympics were held in 1896, you will find two lovely and lively residential areas with excellent dining and nightlife options. To the south of the stadium is the steep and beautiful street of Markou Mousourou, shaded by flowering trees, lined with neoclassical houses, and filled with the scent of jasmine and bougainvillea.

Mets is a taste of old city of Athens, full of pre-World War II houses with tiled roofs and charming courtyards. It’s one of the most beautiful neighborhoods to explore in the city, and the nightlife isn’t bad either. To the south of the stadium is Pangrati, a residential area popular with those who can’t afford Kolonaki. Foreigners, including academics attached to various schools of archaeology, often set up temporary roots here.

Sleeping Beauty

If you enjoy baroque funerary monuments, don’t miss the First Cemetery, where anybody who was anybody in 19th- and 20th-century Greece is buried among the tall cypress trees and many exceptional century-old marble statues. Be sure not to miss the splendid Koimomeni (Sleeping Girl), considered by many to be a high-art masterpiece by Ianoulis Halepas, a sculptor from Tinos, who battled mental illness most of his adult life and died in extreme poverty during World War II. If you prefer your green spaces without tombs, explore Pangrati’s lovely green park, almost a miniforest in the heart of Athens city. There are also lots of neighborhood restaurants and many charming traditional tavernas scattered in Pangrati.

The Embassy District - Leoforos Vas. Sofias (Queen Sophia Blvd.) runs from Syntagma Square toward Athens’s fashionable northeastern suburb of Kifissia. If you walk along Vas. Sofias and explore the side streets that run uphill from it into Kolonaki, you’ll notice the national flags on elegant office buildings and town houses.
This Embassy District stretches past the Hilton, where many embassy workers head for lunch or drinks after work – you should consider doing the same at least once either for lunch or dinner at the excellent seafood restaurant, or for a drink at around sunset on the rooftop’s bar with its jaw-dropping views of the city. The Embassy District is also known as the Museum Mile for the many excellent museums found here just downhill from Kolonaki: The Benaki Museum, the Goulandris Museum of Cycladic Art, the Byzantine Museum, the National War Museum, and the National Gallery.

The Northeast Suburbs
The city of Athens is growing every which way, but much of its expansion is to the northeast, in the valley between the mountains of Penteli to the east and Parnitha to the west. Going north on Leoforos Kifissias, you will pass by Kolonaki, Ampelokipi (with its many first-rate bar/restaurants such as Vlassis, Baraonda, 48, and Balthazar), and Neo Psihiko (check out the Deste Foundation), and you will find yourself in Marousi and Kifissia.

Olympic Sports Complex

Marousi is home to Santiago Calatrava’s redesigned Athens Olympics Sports Complex, the elegant and soaring modernist complex that stole the show during the 2004 Olympics and the stadiums that became the architectural landmarks of the new city; beautiful glass and steel arches over the main stadium; a gorgeous velodrome; the Athens Tennis Academy in a landscaped park filled with sculptures and lined with glass-covered walkways; and a steel arched agora.

The last stop is elegant Kifissia. Cooler than downtown Athens, thanks to its elevation, Kifissia was fashionable enough for the royal family to have a villa here. Here you’ll find elegant 19th-century neoclassical mansions, outrageous 21st-century ones, graceful tree-lined streets, excellent shopping options, lovely parks, two very good museums (the Goulandris Museum of Natural History and the Gaia Center), and some of the city’s best trendy hotels. Add these to countless bars, lounges, and clubs – and the charming open-air cinema dating from 1919 – and you’ll discover that Kifissia is a delight to spend some time in (if you’ve already spent some time in central Athens).

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