Athens Walk: Lycabettus to Panathenaic Stadium

This walk connects three very different chapters of Athens, one after another, on foot.

It starts on Lycabettus and descends into Kolonaki, whose name literally means "little column" — after a small ancient marble column that once stood in what's now Kolonaki Square. Before the 19th century this hillside was open grazing land known as Katsikadika, "goat fields." That changed between 1836 and 1842, when King Otto's court began building royal residences along Vasilissis Sofias Avenue, in a neoclassical street plan drawn up by the same two architects — Stamatios Kleanthis and Eduard Schaubert — responsible for laying out Ermou Street and much of the rest of 19th-century Athens. Aristocrats followed the court, and Kolonaki has stayed the city's most upscale district since.

The walk then passes through Evangelismos metro station, where construction crews building the line found an ancient cemetery with 35 burials, a stretch of a 6th-century BC water supply system, and a pottery workshop that operated from the 2nd century BC into the 1st century AD — all now on permanent display inside the working station, behind glass, next to the platform.

It ends at the Panathenaic Stadium, which is, structurally, one of the strangest buildings still standing anywhere: the only stadium in the world built entirely of marble. The original was a simple track cut into a hillside around 330 BC for the Panathenaic Games; Herodes Atticus rebuilt it in marble by 144 AD, seating 50,000. Abandoned after the 4th century, excavated in 1869, it was restored just in time to host the opening and closing ceremonies of the first modern Olympic Games in 1896 — and the marble it's built from, like the Parthenon's, almost certainly came down from Mount Penteli, on the far side of the same hill this walk started on.

This is what TravelHubCam is here to show you: not one landmark, but a single afternoon's walk that happens to cross royal-era neighborhood planning, a working subway station doubling as an archaeological site, and the marble stadium where the modern Olympics actually began.