Koukaki, Makrygianni and Thiseio

All three are neighbourhoods of the Municipality of Athens, spread around Filopappou hill (the ancient Hill of the Muses), and each name keeps a piece of their history. Makrygianni, on the south side of the Acropolis rock, is named after Ioannis Makrygiannis, a general of the War of Independence who owned a house and fields there, and across from where his house stood is the Weiler building (named after its architect), once a military hospital and now the Centre for Acropolis Studies.

Koukaki, on the south-east side of the hill, seems to owe its name to Georgios Koukakis, an industrialist whose workshop made metal beds (before the war, on Syngrou), and by the 1960s and 1970s it was already densely built. Thiseio takes its name from the Temple of Hephaestus, long mistaken for a temple of Theseus (the Theseion), and Petralona, beyond the hill, recalls the stone threshing floors that stood there.

Koukaki runs from Dionysiou Areopagitou and the foot of the hill down to Syngrou Avenue, and its two largest streets (Veikou and Dimitrakopoulou) carry the trolleybuses, whereas Drakou and Georgiou Olympiou are pedestrian streets of cafés, bars, restaurants and small shops. Makrygianni is described by the metro operator (STASY) as one of the city's most elegant neighbourhoods, for its neoclassical houses and interwar buildings.

The two promenades are possibly the best-known streets in the area. A traffic ban in 2003 turned Dionysiou Areopagitou from one of the noisiest streets in Athens into a walk below the Acropolis, and with Apostolou Pavlou it forms the main pedestrian zone as far as Thiseio. There the cafés of Iraklidon and Akamantos streets are known as places to linger over drinks and meze, and Cine Thision, an open-air cinema facing the Acropolis, has been showing films since the 1930s.

Petralona, according to the visitor guide This is Athens, was once a poor district settled by refugees from Asia Minor, and the guide now finds stone cottages with walled gardens and mid-twentieth-century houses there (Ano Petralona is the part between the hill and the railway, which carries metro Line 1). The same guide credits Petralona and Thiseio alike with many neighbourhood tavernas, ranging, in its words, from cheap to post-modern.

The Acropolis Museum, by Bernard Tschumi with Michael Photiadis, opened in June 2009 about 300 metres south-east of the Parthenon, raised on columns above an excavated ancient neighbourhood (houses with courtyards and wells, private baths, workshops and streets, from the fourth millennium BC to the twelfth century AD). Glass floors let visitors look down into the excavation, which opened to the public in 2019, and the Parthenon Gallery on the top floor looks across to the Acropolis.

Filopappou takes its present name from the monument to Philopappos, a prince of Commagene who died in AD 116, and its paths were laid between 1954 and 1957 by Dimitris Pikionis, who set marble and clay fragments from demolished nineteenth-century buildings into the paving and restored the chapel of Agios Dimitrios Loumbardiaris. Less than a kilometre west of the Acropolis is the Pnyx, where the citizens' assembly of Athens met from as early as 507 BC.

The Ancient Agora can be entered from Thiseio, with the Temple of Hephaestus on its west side and the reconstructed Stoa of Attalos as its museum, while on Syngrou the old Fix brewery, redesigned by Takis Zenetos in 1957, now houses the National Museum of Contemporary Art (EMST).

Line 2 of the metro (Anthoupoli to Elliniko) stops at Akropoli, near the museum, and at Syngrou-Fix, both of which opened in November 2000. Line 1 (Piraeus to Kifisia) stops at Thiseio and Petralona, and Thiseio is the elder by far, since the railway from Piraeus opened there in 1869 and ended there until it reached Omonia in 1895.

Tram line 6, from Syntagma to Pikrodafni, stops at Fix, and buses run along Syngrou Avenue, built by Andreas Syngros and named after him, which runs for about 6.2 km down to Poseidonos Avenue by the bay of Faliro. Between the three neighbourhoods, though, it is likely simplest to walk.

CNN Greece, in a 2023 report, found students, tourists, elderly residents and other locals sharing Koukaki, with kafeneia (old-style coffee houses) across the street from modern bars and busy streets beside quiet paved alleys, and the neighbourhood has had its well-known residents (Mikis Theodorakis among them).

The housing is just as mixed, with neoclassical and interwar houses in Makrygianni and, in Koukaki, apartment blocks of the 1970s and 1980s with coloured awnings, mansions, old houses (many of them renovated, some on the streets beside the hill) and, more recently, new homes and hotels. The post-war blocks belong to the age of antiparochi (an owner trades a plot to a builder for some of the new flats), the usual arrangement from the 1950s onwards.

There are rough edges, nevertheless, that are worth knowing before you buy. A Ta Nea report of December 2023 named Koukaki among the Athens neighbourhoods losing their character, at a time when, across the country, one or more buildings of the interwar years (1922 to 1940) were being demolished almost every week. The CNN Greece report of 2023, for its part, found that short-term letting dominated in Koukaki, so that homes to rent long term were few and expensive.

From 2025 onwards no new short-term rental registrations have been issued in the first three municipal districts of Athens, which, according to SKAI, take in Koukaki as well as Petralona and Thiseio, and in.gr and SKAI reported in January 2026 that an existing registration is deleted when a property there changes hands. In September 2026 To Vima reported that the freeze would run to the end of 2027, and as the rules keep changing, it may be wise to check them with a lawyer before buying with letting in mind.