Ampelokipi and Ilisia

Before Greek independence Ampelokipi (the name means vineyards) was a village a few kilometres north-east of Athens, and it stayed outside the built-up city until late in the 19th century, when wealthy Athenians put up country houses there and the air, thought to be healthy, seems to have drawn several hospitals in the late 1800s and early 1900s. The population grew sharply after 1922 with the refugees from Asia Minor, and a new quarter for them, Kountouriotika, grew up around the Panathinaikos ground.

Ilisia, to the south, takes its name from the Ilissos, a river that rises on Hymettus near Kaisariani and has run underground from the 1960s. Near its right bank, now covered over, the architect Stamatis Kleanthis built the Villa Ilissia (1840 to 1848) for the Duchess of Plaisance, and in 1926 the house was given to the Byzantine and Christian Museum.

Apartment blocks (polykatoikies) appeared in the late 1950s, and Ampelokipi was then built up fast, mostly in the 1960s and 1970s, in the decades when antiparochi (a plot handed to a builder in exchange for some of the flats) was the usual way of paying for such blocks across Athens. A law of 1968 that freed building heights also allowed several towers, among them the Athens Tower at the start of Mesogeion Avenue, which was finished in the early 1970s and, with 28 floors, has been the tallest finished building in Greece for more than fifty years.

Several of the district's landmarks stand on Vasilissis Sofias. The Hilton opened there in April 1963, designed by Emmanouil Vourekas, Prokopis Vasileiadis, Antonis Georgiadis and Spyros Staikos, with marble reliefs by Yannis Moralis on its façades. After a renovation that began in 2022 it reopened on 23 April 2026 as Conrad Athens The Ilisian, although the quarter around it is still called Hilton.

The National Gallery, on Vasileos Konstantinou, was founded in 1900, and the first section of its present building was completed in 1968. Extended and renovated, it was inaugurated again on 24 March 2021, and its collection includes El Greco's Concert of the Angels (bought at auction in Munich in 1931).

Farther along Vasilissis Sofias the Megaron (the Athens Concert Hall) opened on 20 March 1991 with two halls, and Megaro Moussikis station is right outside. Close by are Eleftherias Park, with its statue of Eleftherios Venizelos, and the United States Embassy, a protected building by Walter Gropius completed in 1961.

Alexandras Avenue is the district's other axis. The Panathinaikos ground (commonly called Leoforos, the avenue) was inaugurated there in 1922 and is the oldest football stadium still in use in Greece. Opposite stand the Prosfygika, eight blocks with 228 flats of about 50 square metres, built between 1933 and 1935 for the refugees, and their walls still carry bullet marks from the fighting of December 1944.

Several hospitals stand here too, the Red Cross hospital (Erythros Stavros), the Ippokrateio, Agios Savvas and Elpis among them, while Evangelismos, just to the west in Kolonaki, opened in 1884 and is described as the largest general hospital in Greece (about 1100 beds).

Line 3 of the metro is the district's spine: its first seven stations, between Syntagma and Ethniki Amyna, opened in January 2000, and here it calls at Evangelismos, Megaro Moussikis, Ambelokipi and Panormou before Katehaki. To the west the line has reached Piraeus (Dimotiko Theatro) from October 2022, and to the east some trains run on to the airport, while most end at Doukissis Plakentias, where you can change to the suburban railway.

Buses and trolleybuses also serve Ilisia, but the tram does not come this way (its T6 line starts at Syntagma Square). The avenues (Vasilissis Sofias, Alexandras, Kifissias and Mesogeion) turn up often in the morning traffic reports, and on 29 May 2026, for instance, all four were listed with increased traffic, so the metro is likely the calmer way into the centre.

Panormou Street has quite a few restaurants and places to go out, and in 2019 a guide in Athens Voice recalled that for years the area had been the little island of Athens, full of bars and roof terraces on summer nights. A Saturday street market (laiki) sets up on Louizis Riankour, and around 26 October (the feast of Agios Dimitrios, whose church is in the area) a three-day fair is said to run along Panormou, which is worth checking before planning a visit around it.

Mavili Square is described on the station page of STASY (the company that runs the metro) as a lively spot with cafés, bars and restaurants, and Ampelokipi has long been known for its cinemas, of which the Athinaion, the Danaos and the Galaxias are perhaps the best-known names.

Ampelokipi is a working-class quarter at heart and one of the most populous and densely populated parts of the municipality of Athens, with a large immigrant population (many from South and South-East Asia, in the eastern part between Kifissias and Mesogeion). Ilisia, too, counts among the most densely populated parts of Athens, although it has the pine wood of the Alsos Ilision and two squares with a good deal of greenery (Madrid Square and Brazil Square), and its northern part, Ano Ilisia (upper Ilisia), belongs to the municipality of Zografou.

Two long-running stories hang over Alexandras Avenue, and both may well change this end of the district. Panathinaikos is to move to a new ground at Votanikos, which Kostis Hatzidakis (the deputy prime minister) said in July 2026 would be finished in the summer of 2027, and the plan announced in November 2020 would then turn the Leoforos site into a park of 18 stremmata (a stremma is 1000 square metres), though the details may since have changed. The Prosfygika, for their part, are contested: the Region of Attica plans to restore them with about 15 million euro of EU funds, starting with four of the blocks, three of them as social housing (as Powergame reported in March 2026), and the community of more than 400 people living in the occupied flats opposes the plan. On 24 June 2026 the Athens city council, by a majority vote, called on the Region to halt it.