Pangrati and Mets

Pangrati is often taken for a suburb, possibly because it borders Vyronas and Kaisariani, though it belongs to the City of Athens and runs from Vasilissis Sofias Avenue to the First Cemetery, and the slopes of Hymettus (Υμηττός) once marked its eastern edge. Its name is usually traced to a sanctuary of Herakles Pankrates (the all-powerful), which was found and excavated in 1953 and 1954.

In the nineteenth century the area around the stadium and the Ilissos, a river now covered by Vasileos Konstantinou Avenue, was called Vatrachonisi (frog island), and its first street plan was drawn up on 8 January 1886. By 1915 a horse-drawn tram already ran here from the Zappeion, and the refugees of 1922 filled the district out between the wars. From the 1950s to the 1970s it became largely middle-class, and although it lost residents to the suburbs in the 2000s, that trend seems since to have reversed.

The Panathenaic Stadium, known in Greek as Kallimarmaro (beautiful marble), fills a former ravine between the hills of Agra and Ardittos. Lykourgos built a stadium here around 330 BC, and Herodes Atticus rebuilt it in Pentelic marble in the second century AD. Georgios Averoff paid for its restoration for the first modern Olympic Games in 1896, and it is now described as the only stadium in the world built entirely of marble. The Athens Marathon finishes here, and it is here that Greece hands over the Olympic flame to the country hosting each Games.

Mets lies opposite the Zappeion on the hill of Longinou (a southern continuation of Ardittos), and it is said to owe its name to a beer hall that a Bavarian opened on the slope around 1870, while a presidential decree of 1993 set strict limits on shops and places of entertainment in the district.

The First Cemetery of Athens, opened in 1837 as the city's official cemetery, lies behind the stadium, where Mets meets Pangrati. Theodoros Kolokotronis, Kostis Palamas, Odysseas Elytis, Melina Mercouri and Heinrich Schliemann are among those buried here. The cemetery also keeps the Sleeping Maiden (Κοιμωμένη), which Yannoulis Chalepas carved for the grave of Sofia Afentaki.

The National Garden (15.5 hectares, laid out for Queen Amalia between 1838 and 1840 and opened to the public in the 1920s) lies between Pangrati and Kolonaki, and beside it stands the Zappeion, designed by Theophil Hansen and the first building put up specifically for the revival of the Olympic Games (it opened in 1888). Pangrati has a grove of its own, planted in 1908, as well as Rizari Park, the parks of the Naiads and the Nereids, and the hills of Ardittos and Agra.

Plateia Varnava and Plateia Proskopon (informally Manos Hatzidakis Square; the composer lived in Pangrati from 1936 to 1962) are the two hubs of a café life that spills into the streets around them, while a regional decision of 2017 placed the Friday street market on Archimidous Street. Some places have evidently lasted, Pnyka among them, a family bakery that opened in 1981 and whose central branch grinds its own grain on a stone mill and bakes sourdough bread in a wood-fired oven.

The Goulandris Museum of Contemporary Art opened on 1 October 2019 in a neoclassical mansion of the 1920s with a ten-storey extension (five of its floors underground), and shows the collection of the shipowner Basil Goulandris and his wife Elise (Cézanne, Degas, Gauguin, Van Gogh and Picasso among the painters). What is more, according to This is Athens (a guide to the city), Pangrati has long been home to musicians, writers, directors, academics and journalists, and George Seferis, for one, lived on Agras Street, next to the stadium.

Evangelismos, on metro Line 3, is the nearest station to Pangrati, while Mets is served by Akropoli on Line 2 and by the Zappio stop of the tram from Syntagma. Trolleybuses (lines 2, 4 and 11) and local buses stop at Plateia Plastira, and Ymittou Street runs through the whole of Pangrati, starting at Kaisariani.

Line 4, under construction from Alsos Veikou to Goudi, will meet Line 3 at Evangelismos, although the work is running late. In February 2026 its completion date was moved from June 2029 to September 2032 (To Vima reported the change that April). In August 2026, moreover, the news site Powergame reported that Evangelismos was the only Line 4 site where not even preliminary works had begun, after the environment ministry sent back the environmental study for the station, which placed a worksite in Rizari Park. A station for Pangrati exists only in the plans for a later section to Vyronas and Ano Ilioupoli, and according to a parliamentary question of June 2025 the funding for that section's preliminary design was withdrawn that May.

What comes up for sale is likely to be a flat in a polykatoikia (an Athenian apartment block). From the 1950s the usual way to build them was antiparochi, under which a landowner gives the plot to a builder in exchange for some of the flats. Prices appear to have risen as the district grew fashionable in the 2010s, and This is Athens also notes that people move in but rarely move out. In its research on asking prices for flats, Greca House, a real-estate agency in Athens since 2008, reports Mets and Kallimarmaro separately from Pangrati, and on 1 October 2026 the median asking price per square metre was higher there than in Pangrati (Greca House research).

One rule matters to anyone who would let a flat to visitors. Since 1 January 2025 no new property may be entered in the tax authority's register of short-term rentals in the first three of the seven municipal districts of Athens, Pangrati and Mets included, and a ministerial decision of December 2025 extended the ban to 31 December 2026, so you would need to check what applies after that date. According to a presentation by the Ministry of Social Cohesion and Family in April 2026, 36 887 of the city's 382 811 homes (about one in ten) were let short-term in 2024.