Kallithea

Kallithea (the name means a beautiful view) began to take shape as a town in 1884 and 1885, on the initiative of a building company, and among its first residents were the lawyer Georgios Filaretos, the merchant Laskaris Laskaridis and the historian Georgios Kremos. For a while it was a summer place for prosperous Athenians, although by the early twentieth century its people were more and more of the middle and working classes.

The refugees of 1922 changed the place for good, as its population grew about sevenfold between 1920 and 1928 (from 4185 to 29 656 residents) and the census of 1928 counted 14 036 refugees, most of them, it seems, from Pontus, many of whom at first lived in shacks (at Charokopou, for one). Kallithea left the municipality of Athens as a community in 1925 and became a municipality in 1933, and in the late 1930s the Ministry of Welfare built blocks of flats for refugee families, which still stand (among them a three-storey block of 42 flats in Charokopou).

After the war the town grew upwards, as the old houses gave way to apartment blocks built under antiparochi (the land-for-flats deal between an owner and a builder), which brought, in the municipality's own account, another large rise in population as well as the loss of its open spaces. Each census after 1981 has nevertheless counted fewer people (117 319 then, 97 616 in 2021), and yet, on 4.75 km², that is still more than 20 000 residents to the square kilometre.

The southern end of the town, on the Faliro delta, was cattle pasture in the nineteenth century, then, between 1925 and 2003, a racecourse, and after that a car park left over from the 2004 Olympics. On this land the Stavros Niarchos Foundation built a cultural centre to designs by Renzo Piano's studio, begun in 2012 and handed to the Greek state on 23 February 2017, which houses the National Library of Greece and the Greek National Opera within the 21-hectare Stavros Niarchos Park.

The building is shaped as an artificial hill rising towards the sea, with a canopy of photovoltaic cells (some 10 000 m² of them) over the opera house. A canal of sea water runs along the main axis of the site, and the foundation has paid for the dancing fountains in it, which by its own account draw thousands of visitors.

The spine of the town is Eleftheriou Venizelou Avenue (Thiseos, before it was renamed), which begins at the football ground on the Koukaki boundary and ends, some 4 km later, at Tzitzifies. The centre of the town is Davaki square, with a covered market beside it (where a resident, writing in 2017, found greengrocers, fishmongers, spice sellers and shops for organic food or fabrics), while most of the neighbourhood's cafés, by the same account, were around Kyprou, the second large square.

One of the oldest houses, that of the Laskaridis family, is now the Municipal Gallery, named after the painter Sofia Laskaridou, the first woman to study at the Athens School of Fine Arts. Of Kallithea's two universities, Panteion, on Syngrou Avenue, owes its start to a bequest that Alexandros Pantos left in 1915 and was opened by Eleftherios Venizelos on 18 November 1930, while Harokopio, named after the benefactor Panagis Harokopos, grew out of an older school of home economics and became a university in 1990.

Tzitzifies, at the seaward end, was once a settlement of its own (called Arapika, before the jujube trees that grew there gave it its present name), with a clean beach early in the twentieth century and, until the 1970s, many night venues where rebetiko and laiko were played. The beach was filled in, it seems, in 1968, though the same resident still found a few small fish tavernas there in 2017.

Line 1 of the metro (the old electric railway to Piraeus, run today by STASY) marks part of the town's north-western edge, and its Kallithea station opened in 1928. Tavros (officially Tavros-Eleftherios Venizelos, opened in 1989) lies near the boundary, where a station named Harokopou had been proposed as early as 1925, and by the sea tram line 7 (Piraeus to Voula) stops at Moschato, Kallithea, Tzitzifies and Delta Falirou on this stretch of the coast.

Syngrou Avenue, named after Andreas Syngros, whose bequests paid for a large part of it, carries four lanes each way between the centre and the coast and is lined with hotels and company offices. Buses are many, and the opera's visitor page, as it stood in October 2026, lists, among others, the 550 to Kifisia along Syngrou, the A1 and B1 along the coast, trolleybus 10 from Chalandri and a free daily shuttle from Syntagma by way of the Syngrou-Fix metro station.

A large part of the housing here is in the blocks of flats that antiparochi built, and the town's rough edges likely follow from that. The Athens Social Atlas counts dense construction and a lack of open space among the problems the town faces today, and notes that the surviving refugee blocks of the 1930s are in poor condition because their owners cannot afford the upkeep. Summers may be hard going as well, since the weather station at Harokopio recorded a mean summer maximum of 36.8 °C in 2024.

Much of what is likely to change lies on the side of the sea. Poseidonos Avenue runs between the town and the water, and on 2 September 2026 the contract was signed for AENAON, a metropolitan park of 741 stremmata (about 74 hectares) along the Faliro bay, with raised walkways over Poseidonos meant to connect Kallithea, Moschato and Faliro directly with the sea. By the timetable that Ta Nea reported in October 2026, the park is due to be delivered in 2029. The town's people, for their part, have changed more than once, and in the 1990s Pontic Greeks from the former Soviet Union settled here as well.