Athens, Delphi & Central Greece

The Acropolis was a Mycenaean citadel long before Cleisthenes' reforms of 508 BC made Athens a democracy. The Athenians beat Persia at Marathon in 490 BC and, with a fleet paid for by the silver of Lavrio, in the strait of Salamis in 480 BC, the same summer that Leonidas' Spartans died at Thermopylae; Pericles then spent the tribute of the city's allies on the Parthenon, finished in 432 BC. Central Greece had powers of its own — Delphi, whose oracle was consulted from the 8th century BC, and Thebes, which broke Sparta at Leuctra in 371 BC — until Philip II of Macedon defeated Athens and Thebes together at Chaeronea in 338 BC and Alexander razed Thebes three years later.

Sulla sacked Athens in 86 BC, Hadrian rebuilt it in the 2nd century AD, Theodosius silenced the oracle in the late 4th century and Justinian closed the philosophy schools in 529. After 1204 a Frankish duchy ruled Athens from Thebes, passing to the Catalan Company in 1311 and to Florentine bankers in 1388, until the Ottomans arrived in 1458 and took Venetian Negroponte, today's Chalkida, in 1470. The Parthenon served as a mosque until a Venetian shell hit the powder stored inside it on 26 September 1687, and Lord Elgin's agents stripped its sculptures between 1801 and 1812.

In 1821 Athanasios Diakos died holding the Alamana bridge near Thermopylae, and the fleets of Hydra and Spetses took to sea. Aegina housed Kapodistrias' first government in 1828–29, and Athens became the capital in 1834. The refugees of 1922–23 nearly doubled the city, the occupation famine of 1941–42 killed tens of thousands there, and the Germans shot more than 200 villagers at Distomo in June 1944; the street fighting of December 1944 and the Polytechnic uprising of 17 November 1973 both played out in the centre. The 2004 Olympics gave Athens its metro and airport; the Mati wildfire of July 2018 killed more than 100 people, and much of northern Evia burnt in August 2021.

Athens absorbs people from every province, so the capital's culture is the nation's compressed, and its fiercest loyalties are to football — Olympiacos of Piraeus, Panathinaikos and AEK, founded by Constantinople refugees in 1924. Rebetiko, the urban blues of the refugee quarters, took its classic form in Piraeus in the 1930s and is played again in the tavernas of Psyrri. Athenians fly kites on Philopappos hill on Clean Monday, watch the Evzones change guard at Syntagma on Sunday mornings, fill the Odeon of Herodes Atticus for the Athens Epidaurus Festival each summer and run the November marathon along the ancient route from Marathon.

The countryside keeps older identities. The Arvanites, Orthodox settlers who arrived speaking Albanian from the late 13th century onwards, peopled the villages of Attica, Boeotia, southern Evia, Salamis, Hydra and Spetses; their ships fought the sea war of 1821, and Arvanitika is still heard among the old. Hydra honours Admiral Miaoulis at the Miaoulia in June, and Spetses burns a mock Ottoman flagship at the Armata in September. On Parnassus, Arachova keeps its old customs at the feast of its patron, St George, on 23 April; Galaxidi fights a flour war on Clean Monday, Thebes stages a comic "Vlach wedding" the same day, and Skyros' carnival sends out the Geros, a masked figure in goat skins hung with sheep bells.

The region is Orthodox and given to pilgrimage — to Agios Nektarios on Aegina in November, to St John the Russian at Prokopi on Evia on 27 May, to Osios Loukas below Helicon — yet Athens had no official mosque from independence until one opened in Votanikos in 2020. Delphi keeps a cultural afterlife too: the poet Angelos Sikelianos staged festivals of ancient drama in the theatre there in 1927 and 1930, and the European Cultural Centre of Delphi carries the idea on.

Attica holds about 3.8 million people, more than a third of all Greeks: 640,000 in the municipality of Athens, 170,000 in Piraeus, and the rest in a continuous city of concrete apartment blocks that runs from the wealthy northern suburbs of Kifisia and Maroussi to the working-class west around Peristeri and the beach suburbs of Glyfada and Vouliagmeni. Central Greece has about 500,000: Lamia, the regional capital on the Spercheios plain, has some 50,000 in the town; Chalkida, across the Euripus bridge, about 60,000; Thebes and Livadeia roughly 20,000 each; and Karpenisi, the mountain seat of Evrytania, is a small town.

Athens lives on government, services, tourism and the sea: Piraeus, run by the Chinese shipping line COSCO since 2016, is one of the Mediterranean's busiest container ports, the refineries and shipyards of Elefsina and Skaramangas line the bay beyond it, and the universities keep the centre young. Central Greece is more industrial than visitors expect — the Oinofyta factory belt on the road to Chalkida, the aluminium smelter at Agios Nikolaos on the Gulf of Corinth, cotton and cereals on the drained Kopais plain, Amfissa's olives, and Evia's pine forests. Evrytania and the Parnassus villages have been emptying for decades and live on winter weekends and summer returnees.

The Athenian day starts early, with public offices open by 7:30, keeps less of a siesta than the provinces, eats dinner after nine and fills the bars of Psyrri, Gazi and Exarcheia after eleven; in August the city empties towards the islands and the family village. Its current arguments are about heat, which now has its own city officer, wildfires on the fringe every summer, the migrant neighbourhoods around Omonia and Kypseli, and the short-term lets that have priced Athenians out of Koukaki and Plaka.

Athens eats fast and late. The street staple is souvlaki — in the capital a skewer is a kalamaki, and the pita wrap comes with gyros, tomato, onion, tzatziki and chips — bought from the corner grill, and mornings start with a sesame koulouri from a street cart. The Varvakios market on Athinas Street sells the fish and meat that end up in the tavernas of Psyrri and the mezedopoleia of Exarcheia, and the last decade has produced a serious restaurant scene from Kolonaki to the fishing harbour at Mikrolimano. Attica's own products are the thyme honey of Hymettus and the Savatiano grape of the Mesogeia plain around Koropi and Markopoulo, the historic home of retsina and now of dry whites.

The islands add pistachios from Aegina, grown there since the 19th century and protected by name since 1996. Kythira, administratively part of Attica, sends its thyme honey.

Central Greece is mountain and plain cooking. Arachova's formaela, a firm cheese grilled or fried, its hand-cut hilopites pasta and kontosouvli, pork spit-roasted over embers, feed the ski crowds; Lamia, on the road north, is a town of psistaries, grill-houses serving kokoretsi and lamb; Karpenisi makes sausages, trout from its rivers and pies of wild greens; Kymi on Evia is known for its dried figs; and the Crisaean plain below Delphi grows the fat Amfissa table olive. The Atalanti valley and the slopes of Parnassus have estate wineries, tsipouro is the mountain spirit, and Chalkida's waterfront serves the fish and shellfish of the Euripus.

Athens and the Acropolis come first: the Parthenon, the Erechtheion's Caryatids and the Propylaea on the rock, the Odeon of Herodes Atticus on its south slope and the Acropolis Museum below, then the Ancient Agora with the Temple of Hephaestus, the Tower of the Winds, the Temple of Olympian Zeus, the marble Panathenaic Stadium, the lanes of Plaka and Anafiotika and the National Archaeological Museum with the Mask of Agamemnon and the Antikythera mechanism. Beyond the city are the mosaics of Daphni monastery, the burial mound at Marathon and, at the peninsula's tip, the Temple of Poseidon at Cape Sounion, where the columns catch the sunset.

From Piraeus the Saronic islands are an hour or two away: Aegina, with the Temple of Aphaia, the monastery of Agios Nektarios and the ruined medieval town of Paleochora; car-free Hydra, whose stone mansions ring the harbour; Poros and Spetses; and Salamis, where the battle of 480 BC was fought.

Delphi is the mainland's great site: the Sacred Way climbing to the Temple of Apollo, the theatre and stadium above, the Castalian spring, the tholos of Athena Pronaia and the museum with the bronze Charioteer, on a terrace beneath the Phaedriades cliffs with the olive grove of Amfissa spread below to the sea at Itea and Galaxidi. Arachova, the stone town on the road up, is the base for Mount Parnassus (2,457 m) and its ski centre at Kellaria and Fterolakka, and for the mosaics of Osios Loukas monastery near Distomo. Boeotia adds the Lion of Chaeronea; to the north lies Thermopylae, where the Leonidas monument stands beside a pass that river silt has turned into a plain; to the west Karpenisi, the Velouchi ski centre, the Proussos monastery and the peaks of Giona (2,510 m) and Vardousia. Evia, the second-largest Greek island, has Chalkida's Euripus strait, whose current reverses several times a day, the thermal springs of Edipsos and the ferry from Kymi to Skyros, where Rupert Brooke is buried and the small Skyrian horses graze.