Agia Paraskevi

By the municipality's account the ground belonged in antiquity to Phlya, a large deme (a district of ancient Attica) that reached from what is now Chalandri to Paiania and was, after Eleusis, the foremost place of mystery rites. In the late twelfth century the monastery of Agios Ioannis Kynigos was founded on the slope above, and one of its abbots, Neophytos (known from an inscription of 1238), is believed to have built the road that linked the Athens plain with the Mesogeia, the inland plain to the east.

When the present town began is not known, although it seems to have started as four inns (those of Markos, Belbas, Vlachos and Sertis) serving people who carried produce between Marathon, the Mesogeia and Athens. The first house went up in 1894, people with tuberculosis came for the dry air until the middle of the twentieth century, and from 1948, by the municipality's reckoning, the summer retreat became a year-round town. Named after its church of Saint Paraskevi, it became a community in 1931 and a municipality in 1963.

In the 1960s some 1000 stremmata (about a square kilometre) at the foot of the mountain went to the Demokritos research centre and the American College of Greece. Demokritos, founded in 1961 for peaceful nuclear research, now describes itself as the largest multidisciplinary research centre in Greece, and the country's only nuclear reactor (a research reactor) stands on its grounds. The American College came here from Helleniko in 1965, to make room for the airport's expansion, and its campus holds Pierce (its school) and Deree (its college).

Mesogeion is also home to the ERT broadcasting house, built under the military dictatorship. In 2013, after the government shut the public broadcaster down on 11 June, most of the staff stayed in the building and went on broadcasting until riot police cleared it on 7 November (ERT returned to the air in June 2015).

Mesogeion divides the town in two, with Agios Ioannis to the south-east at the foot of the mountain, Nea Zoi to the south-west, Tsakos further west on the boundary with Cholargos, and Stavros at the eastern end of the avenue. The districts built up later, Kontopefko, Paradeisos and Pefkakia, spread north and north-east from Mesogeion as far as the boundaries with Chalandri and Gerakas. Kontopefko appears, by Greek Wikipedia's account, to have a shopping centre (Iliotropio), cycle paths and an indoor sports hall.

The square in front of the church is likely still one of the town's meeting places (the other being the upper square at Agios Ioannis), as Athens Voice found them in 2012, recalling too that the town had once been known as a pizza neighbourhood. From 12 October 2026 the weekly street market (laiki) is held every Monday in the grounds of the Stavros Kotsis cultural and sports centre. The painter Alekos Kontopoulos lived and worked from 1964 to 1975 in a house that is now a municipal museum, his studio left much as it was.

Line 3 of the metro (run by STASY) seems to serve the town from its edges, its stations standing on or just beyond the boundary: Cholargos (opened in 2010), Nomismatokopeio (the name means mint; 2009) on Mesogeion, and Agia Paraskevi (2010), between the town and Chalandri. Trains run west through Syntagma and Monastiraki to Piraeus, and east to Doukissis Plakentias (where the suburban railway also stops), some going on to the airport.

OASA's buses reach further in, among them the A5 and B5 to central Athens, the 308 to Paiania and Koropi, and two circular lines from Pefkakia and Nea Zoi to the metro. The tram does not come this way (its lines serve the centre, the southern suburbs, Piraeus and Voula).

Mesogeion, with three lanes each way, carries more than 100 000 vehicles a day by Greek Wikipedia's figure. The Hymettus ring road (the A62, a branch of the Attiki Odos) crosses the south-east of the town and was evidently not wanted by many who lived here: residents objected to the felling of trees and the noise, a riot followed in April 1993, and the road, finished in 2001, was covered for only a short stretch, over Deree.

Hymettus (16 km long, and 1026 m high at Evzonas) belongs to the Natura 2000 network, and the monastery of Agios Ioannis Kynigos stands on a foothill of its northern ridge at 340 m (reached from Gravias Street). Its church dates from the late twelfth or early thirteenth century, and from 1975 onwards the monastery has been home to a community of nuns. The association of twelve municipalities that protects the mountain (ΣΠΑΥ) lists a walk from there through thick woods to the Tristrato, with views of the city and the Saronic Gulf.

Its nearness notwithstanding, the mountain may not be easy to get onto, at least by the account of local groups whose complaint an MP put to three ministers on 27 July 2026. Nearly the whole wooded front at its foot, they say, has been granted to the American College, Demokritos, the Ministry of Rural Development, military camps and the cemetery, which leaves the small road to the monastery as the only way in along several kilometres. They name the town's very small share of open space and greenery per resident as its main problem. The municipal council has asked twice (in 2023 and 2025) for the ministry's land to become a park.

The town filled quickly, from 32 904 residents in 1981 to 62 147 in 2021 on under 8 km². The same local groups say that apartment blocks are now going up where detached houses stood. Kontopefko, what is more, has what its residents describe as a chronic smell from the storm drains, and when the matter reached Parliament in June 2026 the Ministry of the Interior replied, in July, that it was still gathering information.

Families will likely weigh the schools, and besides Pierce they include the Lycée Franco-Hellénique Eugène Delacroix, a French international school with French and Greek sections, while Agia Paraskevi station also serves the American Community School of Athens.