athens view mar's hill Greece city landscape town caves road valley
Athens has been continuously inhabited for at least 4,500 years. Classical Athens became the leading city of ancient Greece in the 5th century BC, with its cultural achievements laying the foundations of Western civilization. By the end of Late Antiquity the city experienced decline followed by recovery in the second half of the Middle Byzantine Period (9th-10th centuries AD), and was relatively prosperous during the Crusades, benefiting from Italian trade; after a long period of decline under the rule of the Ottoman Empire, Athens re-emerged in the 19th century as the capital of the independent Greek state, and in 1896 hosted the first modern Olympic Games. In the 1920s a number of Greek refugees, expelled from Asia Minor after the Greco-Turkish War (1919-1922), swelled Athens' population; nevertheless it was most particularly following the Second World War, and from the 1950s and 1960s, that the population of the city exploded, and Athens experienced a gradual expansion in all directions. In the 1980's it became evident that smog from factories and an ever increasing fleet of automobiles, as well as a lack of adequate free space due to overcongestion, had evolved into the city's most important challenges. A series of anti-pollution measures taken by the city's authorities in the 1990s, combined with a substantial improvement of the city's infrastructure (including the Attiki Odos motorway, the expansion of the Athens Metro, and the new Athens International Airport), alleviated pollution considerably and transformed Athens into a much more functional city. capital and largest city of Greece, dominates the Attica periphery; as one of the world's oldest cities, its recorded history spans around 3,400 years.
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Photo credit: © 19th era / Alamy / Afripics
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