Kifisia

Kifisia is a good deal older than its villas, since it was a deme of ancient Attica (known for its water and its fertile land) and the home, it is said, of the playwright Menander. In Roman times Herodes Atticus kept a large estate in the town, where the writer Aulus Gellius was among his guests, and in 1667 the Ottoman traveller Evliya Çelebi found some three hundred houses here, and white cherries that were already famous.

The modern resort, however, began with the railway. Brigands roamed the countryside of Attica in the middle of the nineteenth century, and it was only in 1885, when a steam train known as the Beast (Θηρίο) reached Kifisia, that the town began to grow as a place to escape the summer heat. Wealthy families then built country houses in what was evidently a keen social competition, so the villas came in ever more exotic styles, and for those without a house of their own, hotels such as the Pentelikon had opened by the 1920s.

The Kefalari hotels later served as the headquarters of the Royal Air Force, until ELAS attacked and took them in December 1944. Much of the town was nevertheless built up only after the Second World War (parts of Politeia as late as the 1980s and 1990s), and the municipality, which in 2011 also took in Nea Erythraia and Ekali, had 72 878 residents at the 2021 census, 48 700 of them in Kifisia itself.

Opposite the station lies the grove (Alsos Kifisias), where each spring the municipality holds a flower show whose roots go back to 1896. Kolokotroni Street, often said to be the most expensive shopping street of the northern suburbs, leads up to the small park and cafés of Kefalari square. Kassaveti Street has more shops and cafés, at weekends horse-drawn carriages may be waiting at the corner of Levidou and Kolokotroni, and Varsos, a pastry shop open since 1892, is something of a local institution.

The Goulandris Natural History Museum, founded in 1964 by Angelos and Niki Goulandris, began with botany and in 1977 took in zoology, palaeontology and geology, adding the Gaia environmental centre in 2000. A law of 2024 made it the National Museum of Natural History, and it was inaugurated under that name in November 2025, with a new exhibition on biodiversity.

Nea Erythraia (18 604 residents in 2021) was founded by refugees from the Erythraia peninsula of Asia Minor, from villages such as Lythri and Alatsata, who came to Kifisia after the catastrophe of 1922 and built their first houses in 1925. Its built-up area now runs straight into Kifisia's, it has lately been filling in at Kastri and Mortero, and the Athens to Lamia national road passes through its western part.

Ekali (5574 residents in 2021) is a different kind of place. A building company laid it out in 1922 on the model of an English garden city, it became a community in 1928, and it is still purely residential (no shops or offices are allowed among the houses), at the western end of the wooded Penteli range.

Kifisia itself is a patchwork of neighbourhoods (Adames, Ano and Kato Kifisia, Alonia, Kefalari, Nea Kifisia and Politeia), of which Politeia is the highest (up to 330 m). So much greenery has its risks, nevertheless: on 3 August 2021, during a fire that broke out at Varympompi and Thrakomakedones, Adames (one of Kifisia's neighbourhoods) was evacuated and houses there burned.

Line 1 of the metro (the old Piraeus to Kifisia electric railway, run today by STASY) ends at Kifisia, a station opened in 1957, and stops one station earlier at KAT, named after the hospital beside it. The line has 24 stations in all and reaches Piraeus by way of Marousi, Omonia, Monastiraki and Faliro. The tram does not come this far north (its two lines serve the centre and the southern suburbs as far as Voula and Piraeus), whereas OASA's bus 550 runs from Kifisia to Palaio Faliro.

Kifisias Avenue (about 20 km long, and the main road to the centre) ends at the boundary of Nea Erythraia and continues as Thiseos Avenue towards Ekali. The Attiki Odos, the toll motorway between Elefsina and the airport, can be joined at its interchange with Kifisias Avenue in Marousi.

Traffic is the obvious weakness. Severe congestion is a daily matter on Kifisias Avenue (worst around Marousi), and in July 2026 the mayor, Vasilis Xypolytas, said that the northern suburbs could not stay trapped between Kifisias Avenue and the Kifisos. Relief by rail seems some way off, since an extension of line 1 north to Nea Erythraia, proposed since at least 2020, still had no specific and binding timetable, as a member of parliament put it in a question to the minister that month.

The climate made the resort and likely still counts for something. Kifisia has a lower mean annual temperature than downtown Athens and the coastal suburbs (its height and its trees are the usual explanation), although the mean maximum in summer still reaches about 32 °C. Its rainfall is among the highest in the Athens plain, what is more, and snow comes more often than in the centre, with 80 cm in January 2002.

Homes follow the town's history, from the villas and gardens of the oldest quarters (Kato Kifisia, Kefalari and Alonia) to the post-war streets that make up most of the rest. Families will likely weigh the schools, and among the private ones here are the International School of Athens (formerly TASIS), an International Baccalaureate school that takes pupils up to the age of 18, and the Ekali campus of the Arsakeia-Tositseia schools, which opened in 1972.