Athens

Michael Llewellyn Smith describes the history and culture of Athens, site of the 2004 Olympic Games and city of monuments enduring, purged and restored. Exploring its streets and squares, he reveals layers of Ancient Greek, Roman and Byzantine history, elegant Bavarian neoclassical buildings, and a modern city of concrete and glass, metro and tram.

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Modern Athens is a bustling, overgrown city, continually coming to terms with its illustrious past. Dominated by the Parthenon, the world-famous symbol of classical antiquity, it has been touched by every aspect of Greece's turbulent history, suffering invasions and occupations, sieges, division and dictatorship, and has grown dramatically into a metropolis of four million people. Mixing old and new, the Greek capital is a treasure house of eastern Orthodox and western culture, rich in the visual arts, architecture and poetry. - THE CITY OF VISITORS: treasure hunters and Philhellenes; Byron and Chateaubriand; Thackeray and Mark Twain; Freud, Virginia Woolf and Winston Churchill. -THE CITY OF OLYMPIANS: host of the first modern Games of 1896 and the Olympiad of 2004; the revival of the Olympic idea. -THE CITY OF ATHENIANS: classical soldiers and thinkers; poets, politicians and princes; migrants and refugees from Greece and beyond.