Vrilissia

Vrilissia takes its name from the mountain above it, since Penteli was known in antiquity as Brilessos (or Brilettos), and the marble quarried on its slopes went into much of the Acropolis. The land itself belonged to the ancient deme of Phlya, centred on present-day Chalandri, and by one local account it was farmland and pasture until the twentieth century.

By the same account the town began in 1930, when an agricultural company divided land at the foot of the mountain into plots for landless refugee farmers (each family had a small one for a house and a larger one to cultivate), on a grid of straight streets that still shapes the centre. In 1949 the settlement left Chalandri to become a community of its own, with 825 residents at the census of 1951, and in 1990 it became a municipality.

Growth came late and then quickly, from 7587 residents in 1981 to 16 571 ten years later and 32 417 in 2021. In the run-up to the Athens Olympic Games of 2004 the town was linked to the Attiki Odos, the metro and the suburban railway, and it gained a ring road, a wider central avenue, flood works and a municipal bus service.

The centre is built around the church of the Ascension (Analipseos) and its square, and both this square and Iroon Square, the other main one, have small cafés. The commercial part of town lies mainly along Pentelis Avenue, the main road to Chalandri and central Athens, and its northern stretch is, by one account, where the restaurants gather. What sets the town apart is likely its plan, as the roads are unusually wide and straight for Athens, the centre allows no more than four floors of flats, and a high share of homes have gardens of their own.

Almost the whole town is zoned as purely residential, according to the municipality (the zone allows homes, small shops for daily needs, schools, welfare buildings and sports grounds). The neighbourhoods include Analipsi, Rematia (named after the stream bed that runs down through the town towards Chalandri), Ano Vrilissia higher up, Patima hill on the first slopes of Penteli and the Plakentias area to the east. The upper parts seem to have come into the town plan late, Ano Vrilissia in 1986 and Patima in 1999.

There are perhaps few sights in the usual sense, and the pleasures of the town are mostly green ones, among them a grove on a former naval base that passed to the town after a long dispute. The municipality singles out this grove (Alsos Vrilission, named after Maria Callas) and also counts the Attiko Park it shares with Chalandri, the park along the Rematia, the Mikis Theodorakis park and a string of small squares.

In Ano Vrilissia a space once dug into pits for the marble workshops nearby was gradually shaped into an open-air theatre, now named after the actress Aliki Vougiouklaki. It is the home of the municipal festival, which in 2026 held its 37th season from July to late September (classical and modern plays, concerts and the work of younger artists) before more than 18 000 spectators, according to the municipality.

The railway serves Vrilissia from its edges rather than its centre. Pentelis station, on the suburban railway, lies inside the municipality in the central strip of the Attiki Odos where the motorway crosses Pentelis Avenue; it opened in February 2007, and its trains run to the airport in one direction and to Piraeus or Ano Liosia in the other (lines A1 and A2).

Doukissis Plakentias, a little to the east, is formally in Chalandri, although it stands where three municipalities meet and one of its entrances faces Vrilissia. Named after the Duchess of Plaisance, a philhellene who bought land around Penteli in the 1830s, it opened in July 2004 on both the suburban railway and line 3 of the metro (run by STASY), most of whose trains start here and run underground through Syntagma towards Piraeus. Its bus station has routes to the north-eastern suburbs, the northern Mesogeia and East Attica, and the municipal buses of Vrilissia call there too.

By car, the Attiki Odos (the toll motorway between Elefsina and the airport) can be joined at Pentelis Avenue and at Doukissis Plakentias. The tram does not come this far north.

Vrilissia is described as an affluent suburb whose residents come mostly from the middle and upper income bands, and its homes are mostly houses and low blocks of flats, as one might expect of a town that grew from garden plots. Families will likely weigh the schools, and besides the state kindergartens, primary schools, gymnasia and lyceums there are the private Kantas schools (a kindergarten and primary school that also keeps a weather station with the National Observatory of Athens).

Living so close to the mountain has its price, nevertheless, and the price is fire. The great fire of July 1995 reached Vrilissia, and in the summer of 2007 two fires (the first north-east of the town, the second, in August, inside it) burned dozens of houses and patches of forest. In August 2024 a wildfire that began near Varnavas, some 35 km north of Athens, was described as the first to reach so deep into the built-up suburbs, and on Patima hill it burned houses and businesses. For a buyer the balance is likely the one above (gardens and two stations within reach, against the risk on the upper slopes), so it is worth asking where on the hill a house stands and what lies above it.