One eye on the past, one on the future
Athens boasts incomparable landmarks, but the city is best explored through the people who keep its traditions alive.
By Nicola Chilton
The streets of Athens aren’t conventionally beautiful. At least not in the Florentine, Venetian or Parisian way. The city is a jumble of polykatoikia, concrete apartment blocks from the mid-20th century, with roll-up awnings and plant-filled balconies. There’s a cacophony of motorbikes and car engines. Graffiti, from street art to political commentary, covers almost every wall in some neighbourhoods.
But there is extraordinary beauty here. The city’s big-ticket sites, like the Ancient Agora, the political and economic heart of classical Athens, and the marble Panathenaic Stadium, site of the first modern Olympic Games, are glorious. In the spring, the streets smell of orange blossom. In summer, jasmine fills the air. Signs point the way to mythical-sounding places like the Tower of the Winds and the Temple of Olympian Zeus. Follow them, and you’re walking in the footsteps of philosophers and legends. And at the most unexpected moments, the city’s greatest beauty reveals itself. Turn a corner on busy Ermou Street, or stop at a traffic light on Syngrou Avenue, and the Parthenon appears above it all. Bathed in sunlight atop the Acropolis by day and glowing like a lighthouse at night.
The view from the rooftop pool of The Dolli is perhaps the best of all. A mansion-turned-fabric emporium, it reopened in 2023 as a boutique hotel. A contemporary reinterpretation of its neoclassical bones, it features an art collection with pieces by Jean Cocteau, Pablo Picasso, and Alexander Calder. Above, the Acropolis is reflected on the surface of the pool like a mirror. The view is equally thrilling from the penthouse at Perianth, a sleek hotel housed in a modernist building dating to the 1930s. A symphony of greys and terrazzo, it’s located on a corner in central Athens where generations-old fabric shops sit alongside modern cafés.
It is this dichotomy—the classical and the contemporary side by side—that makes Athens so interesting. While the Parthenon has kept watch over the city for millennia, albeit scarred by invaders and treasure hunters, I sense change here. Athens hasn’t pursued the gentrification that has polished so many European cities. Neighbourhood coffee shops and tavernas still outnumber international chains, but there is a sense of impermanence. As though it should be appreciated now before it changes forever.
Hero image: The Parthenon from the rooftop pool of The Dolli. A former mansion and fabric emporium, it opened as a boutique hotel in 2023. Photo courtesy of The Dolli at Acropolis. The city is a jumble of polykatoikia, concrete apartment blocks from the mid 20th century with roll-up awnings and plant-filled balconies. Above, one of the largest temples ever built, the Parthenon has kept watch over Athens for millennia. Both photos by Nicola Chilton.
But there are people working to keep Athenian traditions alive. On Voulis Street, Ariston bakery has been making some of the best pies in Athens since 1910. I buy a hot marathopita, a Cretan pie stuffed with fennel, to warm my hands against the January chill as I wait for Natassa Pappa, founder of Desired Landscapes, a small publishing house that offers walking tours of the Greek capital. I’m curious to see the city through her eyes, and to learn more about Athens’ stoas, the bustling arcades and covered passages, often overlooked by visitors, that are home to small shops and businesses. I know Athens well, yet Pappa leads me through stoas I’ve never seen before, explaining how they would typically follow the medieval model of gathering merchants practicing the same trade.
The stoas also offer a way to avoid the chaos of the streets and the intense summer heat. They’re like a system of veins connecting the city’s main arteries. Later, as we sit in a taxi in traffic, Nikos Trivoulidis, director of fundraising and development at the Benaki Museum, tells me that he often navigates Athens via its stoas, buying items he doesn’t need along the way to support the small businesses within. We’re heading now to a place that has brought an important part of Athens’ craft heritage back from the brink.
Mentis-Antonopoulos Passementerie, or NEMA, a Benaki Museum outpost in the neighbourhood of Petralona, was once a major producer of silk trimmings, tassels, and braids for customers including the Greek National Opera and the Palace Guard. The Mentis workshop closed in 2011, one of the last vestiges of traditional Greek silk-making, but was reopened in 2012 as a centre for silk arts with its original machinery and equipment. Today, it’s open to visitors, and is once again an atelier filled with kaleidoscopic spools of silk from the northern city of Soufli. A small team of craftspeople, under the watchful eye of Virginia Matseli, makes exquisite items like necklaces, earrings, bag straps and pompoms for clients including Greek designers Zeus+Dione, as well as international houses such as Jean Paul Gaultier and Dior.
Later, in the Psyri neighbourhood, I ring the bell of an unmarked door. I’m greeted by Lisa Sarigiannidou and walk down the stairs into the hidden world of Savapile hatmakers. “If somebody wants to find you, they will,” Sarigiannidou says. “We always try to do the easy stuff, but it was nice when we could explore a little bit. When you could come down and say, was this here all the time?”
Top, an Acropolis Luxury Junior Suite at The Dolli. Photo courtesy of The Dolli at Acropolis. Above, the Panathenaic Stadium was the site of the first modern Olympic Games, in 1896. Athenians come here to walk, to run, and to meet friends, with views over the streets of Athens below. Photo by Nicola Chilton.
Sarigiannidou’s atelier covers two subterranean levels: one where she makes the straw hats that are the brand’s signature, and another where she crafts traditional Greek fisherman’s caps. Her father, the Sava in Savapile, started the workshop in 1960, and Sarigiannidou inherited it when he passed away. “I didn’t know I was creative,” she says as we sit in her workshop. On the walls hang stylish straw hats that are snapped up by luxury boutiques on the Greek islands. Her father’s passing coincided with the Greek economic crisis and she considered closing the business, but something carried her forward.
“At the time, most straw hats came from China and they cost a euro or something. I thought I’d try it for five years. It has been 15 years now,” she says. Hers is the last atelier in Athens making them the traditional way. It’s slow fashion, she makes them single-handedly. Hat in hand, I leave hoping that more people make the effort to find this spot.
Psyri is where to tap into Athens’ rebellious, non-conformist spirit. It’s a neighbourhood of artisans and markets, of shops piled high with spices, olives, and wicker baskets, of cafés and restaurants that have been feeding residents and workers for longer than anyone can remember. At Avli, a tiny courtyard taverna wedged between two buildings, locals (and increasingly visitors) queue up for old-school dishes like meatballs, saganaki fried cheese, and big Greek salads.
Around the corner, Linou Soumpasis & Sia is a modern, minimalist taverna serving unpretentious seasonal cuisine like hearty kakavia fish soup, wild greens, and golden thistle tempura. Some of the metal tables cling to the pavement edge, requiring diners to pull in their elbows when taxis drive past.
Another neo-taverna making waves is Pharaoh, in the edgy neighbourhood of Exarcheia. Here, traditional Greek dishes are prepared on wood-burning stoves and served in an industrial-chic room. Diners eat fried eggs with Greek truffle, lamb with wild chicory, and chestnut stew with onions at a stainless-steel counter where a DJ spins vinyl. It’s a formula that is popping up more and more across the city, proof that there is a desire to hold onto the old, while giving it a sense of the new. The inspiration for Pharaoh came from the kafeneio culture, the old-school cafés and tavernas that were once the centre of Greek social life. “We want our guests to leave with the feeling they’ve experienced something unique, something that goes beyond a typical restaurant,” says co-owner Fotis Vallatos. “The interior has an industrial, avant-garde edge, but the food is cooked over woodfire in a way that honours age-old techniques. Our approach is deeply rooted in tradition, but the way we present it is thoroughly modern.”
Perhaps that is the allure of Athens, its ability to keep one eye on the past and one on the future. It’s a reminder, too, that real beauty lies in the contrasts.
Lisa Sarigiannidou of Savapile hatmakers. Photo by Nicola Chilton.
