Athens Center Walk: Petralona to Plaka via Ermou (Spring 2024)

This walk starts in a neighborhood most Athens visitors never see: Ano Petralona. The name comes from "Petrina Alonia" — stone threshing floors, once used here to process grain before the city grew over them. In the 1950s, Queen Frederica's building program added the so-called "Stone Houses," pastel-colored, village-style homes on narrow lanes lined with lemon and olive trees, built for what was then an aristocratic district hugging the foot of Filopappou Hill.

From there the route passes through Thiseio and climbs the promenade around Filopappou Hill, a stretch that's quietly become one of the more café-dense parts of the city, before dropping down to the antique district of Monastiraki. Its flea market traces back to a specific person: Elias Yussuroum, a trader from Smyrna who opened Athens' first antique shop here at the end of the 19th century. Everything that followed grew outward from that one shop.

The walk then turns onto Ermou Street, Athens' main pedestrian shopping artery — though it wasn't always pedestrian. The street was closed to cars in stages between 1995 and 1998, and the change was deeply unpopular at first: a survey of wholesalers on the street found 97% opposed to it. Once it opened, foot traffic did what the retailers hadn't expected, and shops that had fought the project ended up more profitable because of it. The stretch past Funky Panda, Oggi, and the Ermou Passage arcade is a direct result of that reversal.

Ermou opens onto Mitropoleos Square, dominated by the Metropolitan Cathedral of Athens. Construction began on Christmas Day 1842, under three successive architects, and took twenty years — and the builders used marble stripped from 72 demolished Byzantine churches from across Greece to build it, a deliberate symbol of a newly unified nation gathering its own scattered history into one building.

The walk ends near Syntagma, past the Swiss Corner accessories store and the stop for the X95, the 24-hour express bus that connects central Athens directly to the airport, before finishing in the narrow lanes of Plaka.

This is what TravelHubCam is here to show you: one continuous hour on foot, crossing a village-like hillside neighborhood, a market built by one trader's decision, a shopping street that survived its own retailers' objections, and a cathedral built from the stones of the churches it replaced.