Athens is the capital and largest city of Greece. It is one of the world’s oldest cities, with its recorded history spanning over 3,400 years. The city is home to two UNESCO World Heritage Sites, the Acropolis of Athens and the medieval Daphni Monastery. Athens was the host city of the first modern-day Olympic Games in 1896.
About Athens, Greece in brief
Athens is the capital and largest city of Greece. It is one of the world’s oldest cities, with its recorded history spanning over 3,400 years. The city is home to two UNESCO World Heritage Sites, the Acropolis of Athens and the medieval Daphni Monastery. Athens was the host city of the first modern-day Olympic Games in 1896, and 108 years later it hosted the 2004 Summer Olympics. In modern times, Athens is a large cosmopolitan metropolis and central to economic, financial, industrial, maritime, political and cultural life in Greece. According to Eurostat in 2011, the functional urban area of Athens is the 9th most populous FUA in the European Union, with a population of 3.8 million people. The name of the city is probably not of Greek or Indo-European origin, and is possibly a remnant of the Pre-Greek substrate of Attica. In antiquity, it was debated whether Athens took its name from its patron goddess Athena or Athena took her name from the city. In both versions, Athena offered the first domesticated olive tree to the first king of Athens, Cecrops, as the judge of Athens. In an alternative version of the Vergil’s myth, Poseidon gave the Athenians the horse instead of the olive tree. The Parthenon is considered a key landmark of early Western civilization, as is the National Library of Greece, the National and Kapodistrian University of Greece and the Academy of Athens in Athens.
The National Archeological Museum, featuring the world’s largest collection of ancient Greek antiquities, is also home to several museums and cultural institutions, including the Museum of Cycladic Art, the Benaki Museum and the Byzantine and Christian Museum. Athens is also the southernmost capital on the European mainland and the warmest major city in Europe. It has a large financial sector, and its port Piraeus is both the largest passenger port in Europe, and the second largest in the world. The Municipality of Athens, which actually constitutes a small administrative unit of the entire city, had a population of 664,046 within its official limits, and a land area of 38. 96 km2. The Athens Urban Area extends beyond its administrative municipal city limits, with an area of 3,090,508 over an area of 412 km 2. It was possibly rendered in the plural later on, like those of Θῆβαι and “υκῬ” (in Classical Attic) a plural. It was the birthplace of democracy, largely because of its cultural and political impact on the Europe continent, and in particular the Romans. The Greek goddess of wisdom, Athena, competed against God of Poseidon, the goddess of the Seas, for patronage of the yet-unnamed city; they agreed that whoever gave the Athensians the better gift would become their patron and judge.
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This page is based on the article Athens, Greece published in Wikipedia (as of Dec. 31, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
