See the Historic Ruins Hidden Inside Everyday Buildings in Athens

The sun had just started to set when the lights on the streets of Athens turned on one by one, illuminating the Greek capital. On a cold winter night in early 2024, I followed Lydia Carras to her home, a beautiful neoclassical building in Plaka, one of the oldest neighborhoods in the world, believed to have been continuously inhabited for more than 5,000 years. Carras unlocked the heavy front door, and as we entered, I felt like I was walking into a time machine. She first guided me around the front yard, which dates to the Middle Ages, then took me to a small, Byzantine-era church on an upper level. The most interesting part of her house, however, was in the basement.

We walked down a narrow staircase surrounded by hundreds of books and arrived in what is today the family’s cellar. “When we first came to this house, we did a huge restoration,” Carras said. Behind a wall built in the sixth century B.C.E., workers uncovered a previously unknown room, this one even older than the rest of the house. A narrow corridor led to two small halls. On one side, tucked among wooden racks filled with bottles of fine wine, stood a marble base that once held a statue of Hestia, the Greek goddess of the hearth. On the other side, hidden in the floor near the back of the hall, was a small well.

“Be careful! Don’t fall down,” Carras shouted as I approached the well. “Sometimes it has water in it.”

Based on comparisons with several other wells in Plaka, the Carras family speculates that theirs dates to the Persian occupation of Athens in the fifth century B.C.E. During the Greco-Persian Wars, invaders tore down the original Parthenon and captured Athens, which they held for less than a year. Pericles later built a new Parthenon—the one seen at the Acropolis today.

Athens is a metropolis that has been shaped by the sufferings and triumphs of its past. The city-state reached its Golden Age between 480 and 404 B.C.E., with Pericles’ leadership driving much of this economic and cultural growth. In 338 B.C.E., the Macedonian king Philip II and his 18-year-old son, Alexander the Great, conquered Athens and a coalition of Greek city-states at the Battle of Chaeronea, setting the stage for the Hellenistic period. The next invaders to occupy Athens were the Romans, who successfully besieged the city in 86 B.C.E.

As the Roman Empire declined and the Byzantine Empire rose in the fourth century C.E., Athens lost importance, becoming a small village at the edge of Byzantine territory. During the medieval period, Athens fell under Frankish, Catalan and Venetian rule before finally succumbing to the Ottomans in 1458. The city remained under Ottoman control for more than 300 years, until the Greek War of Independence in the early 19th century. Athens was selected as the capital of the newly established country of Greece in 1834.

Back at the Carras home, my fascinating journey in time continued as we moved up to the next floor. “Many houses in Plaka have in the basement [remnants of] the ancient era,” Carras said. “Then on the ground floor, they preserve something Byzantine or medieval, and on the upper floors, it is more modern, of the 19th century or so.” When warfare and natural disasters ravaged these higher levels in the 20th and 21st centuries, “they were remade like the old ones,” Carras added.

Carras is the founder and president of the Greek Society for the Environment and Cultural Heritage (ELLET), which is located on Tripodon Street in Plaka. A section of the original street is saved in the basement of the office, but the rest has been paved with asphalt. A fifth-century B.C.E. retaining wall, which once protected the building, today forms the western wall of the house. The new structures were basically built from the ruins of the old ones. “The ancient with the medieval and the newer coexist in the life of the house,” Carras said.

Walking on the streets of downtown Athens, under the shadow of the Acropolis and myriad similarly ancient monuments, it’s easy to imagine that the city holds more than meets the eye. As a popular Greek saying goes, whichever stone you pick up, you will find something ancient underneath. Greece’s capital is the perfect example of this adage.

In 2020, routine sewage work on Aiolou Street, one of the busiest and oldest corridors of Athens, uncovered a bust of the Greek god Hermes. In 2013, archaeologists excavating the northwest corner of the ancient Agora, now occupied by umbrellas and tables set up by local restaurants, discovered that the ancient Greeks also dined in this area. The dig revealed traces of stake holes, in addition to a well filled with more than 100 ceramics, leading experts to conclude they’d found an ancient tavern. In the late 1990s, during excavations of Athens’ subway, archaeologists and construction workers came face to face with a whole subterranean world.

What lies beneath the Greek capital is an ancient landscape, which over the years evolved and integrated into the city seen today. Much of ancient Athens is hidden from the public eye but known to the owners of buildings surrounding the Acropolis. Some of these locals have incorporated remnants of previous eras into their homes, making the dwellings a multilayered testament to the city’s rich history.

Today, the basement of the Brettos bar in Plaka houses a delicatessen. In the middle of the room, a weathered column of unknown age holds up the ceiling. “From its design, I assume it is pre-Christian, but we have actually no idea of when or how this ended up here,” said Michalis Chrysanthopoulos, one of the business’ owners.

Some sites in Athens offer evidence of later eras in the city’s history, like its occupation by the Ottoman Empire. A five-minute walk from Brettos sits a mansion once occupied by Dimitrios Gasparis, a French consul who was appointed by Napoleon Bonaparte in the late 18th century. The current owner, Despoina Stratigis, is a distant relative of the Gasparis family. She lives in the mansion with her husband and their two children. “The current house we believe was first inhabited around 1790,” Stratigis said. “A big part of it is Ottoman, and the rest must have been built later.”

The Gasparis home served as a gathering place for the most prestigious visitors to 18th- and 19th-century Athens. According to Stratigis, it appears in the maps of Friedrich Stauffert, a Prussian architect and city planner, and it counted the French poet Alphonse de Lamartine and the English queen Caroline of Brunswick among its famous guests. “We have engravings and testimonies about all of this,” she said.

Stratigis’ family first started restoring the house when she was 23 years old. She was surprised by what she saw. The yard was a veritable open-air museum. Reminders of different periods in Athens’ past lingered everywhere: columns, for example, and inscriptions decorating the outdoor stairs leading to the second floor, which were created by Gasparis with ancient fragments found on his property. Part of an ancient wall was hidden under the guestroom.

“During the Ottoman years, there were two mosques here,” Stratigis said. When Francesco Morosini, the doge of Venice, bombed Athens in 1687 during the Great Turkish War, “a lot of parts from the mosques were scattered around,” she added. “The pillar that is out here and the various tombstones were apparently used in the mosque as recyclable material and were [later] found here during the excavation.”

When someone wants to restore a building or construct a new one in Athens’ historic city center, archaeologists must first conduct an excavation of the site—a project that might take years to finish. The most important findings are exhibited in museums or transferred to the Greek Archaeological Service’s storage facilities. The rest are registered and left in situ. “I am honored by what I have in my yard,” Stratigis said. “I feel privileged [that] I grew up here, but this also comes with an obligation to preserve [the site’s history]. We are its guardians.”

Like Stratigis, the Fafalios family uncovered a spectacular find while restoring their home on Tripodon Street. “When we bought the house in 2005, it was all burned to the ground,” I. Fafalios recalled. “Inside, it was a mess. There was only the facade left, but it, too, was half destroyed.” Soon, the family realized that a big section of an ancient wall stood right in the middle of their planned living space.

As a construction company started working on rebuilding the house, the family puzzled over how to handle the centuries-old wall. “We had to decide whether we [should] incorporate the ancient wall into another wall or … leave it all open plan, so that the ancient wall stands on its own,” Fafalios said. They decided on the latter, so today, a chunk of the wall stands in the middle of their living room. The rest is hidden under a hatch.

“Do you want to go down there and see it?” Fafalios suggested when I visited the family’s home in February 2024.

As I descended the steep wooden stairs, I saw the huge rocks supporting the foundations of the house—a continuation of the wall I’d viewed earlier at ELLET’s nearby headquarters.

In total, the Fafalioses have 26 archaeological pieces on their property, all of which are registered with the national archaeological service. They are not allowed to dig deeper than 1.5 feet when gardening in their yard, a small oasis in the always buzzing city center.

On a rainy morning in January 2024, I embarked on a journey around Athens, my home of 36 years, with archaeologists Leda Costaki and Annita Theocharaki, two of the four co-founders of Dipylon, a nonprofit organization dedicated to the study of ancient topography and the cultural environment. The group has been researching and mapping Athens since 2014. Its goal is to combine digital technologies like geographic information system (GIS) software with archaeology, thereby helping scholars with their research while also making valuable information available to the public.

“We wanted to put all of the excavations [in Athens] on a single platform, from the first to the last,” said Theocharaki. “We’re talking about at least 170 years and a total of 1,473 excavations.”

The team’s latest project is an interactive walk that follows an ancient road that connected the Kerameikos, a settlement of potters and vase painters, to Plato’s Academy. Dipylon’s most popular walk, though, is one that allows users to explore Athens like never before, by tracing the course of the ancient city wall, which “surrounds the city like a historical chain,” according to a description on the nonprofit’s website.

“On every step along the wall, you will meet the visible traces of the ancient past,” the description promises. “You will find yourself in basements, in open-air plots and under glass floors.”

Back in January, Costaki, Theocharaki and I walked down Stadiou Street, one of the main roads in downtown Athens, which follows the invisible contours of the wall. We saw a Roman tomb under the glass floor at the entrance of a clothing store, then proceeded to nearby Dragatsaniou Street. At No. 6, a small ramp at the center of a portico led about 30 to 50 feet below ground, where we encountered surviving parts of the Themistoclean Wall, which was built by the Athenian statesman Themistocles in the fifth century B.C.E. On the other side of the portico, a small part of the wall was nestled inside a printing office.

“This is the shocking thing, that this [wall], which was huge both for the history of the city and as a topography, … was so monumental and now we don’t see it,” Costaki said. “If I tell someone about the walls of ancient Athens, they will most likely reply, ‘Which walls? Where is it?’ Almost no one knows that Athens had a wall.”

In 2022, Dipylon collaborated with the Plaka-based Paul and Alexandra Canellopoulos Museum (CAMU) to organize tours that introduced locals and visitors alike to Athens’ centuries-old walls. The museum is one of the rare places that offers a view of this history, as it incorporates part of the medieval city wall of Athens, known as the Rizokastro, in its basement, along with a section of a late Byzantine house that was unearthed with a well-preserved entrance, a threshold and a storage jar.

“One era enters another,” said CAMU’s director Nikolas Papadimitriou, of the area surrounding the Acropolis. “Building materials were being recycled until [locals] decided, ‘I’m not using this anymore, because it’s a monument.’ But this is very new, a 20th-century view. Until then, people used the [same] materials all the time.”

Papadimitriou added, “From the fifth century [B.C.E.] until Roman times, there must have been so much marble and Piraeus stone around here that it was inevitable not to use it.” Churches are one of the most visible examples of this trend.

Located under the north slope of the Acropolis, CAMU was established in 1976 to house a collection of around 6,000 items owned by the Canellopoulos family. Apart from the basement of the museum and the 19th-century ceiling paintings on the first floor, the building has been refurbished extensively, removing many traces of the site’s history.

Athens has always been surrounded by walls, some of which extended down to Piraeus, a port southwest of the city. Big segments of these walls were still visible through World War II, said Theocharaki. “In the 20th century, they disappeared with the intense reconstruction that took place everywhere in Athens,” she explained. “Very often, they built on [top of] them. Because they were very solid structures, they were used as foundations. Only from the [1950s] onward did we start to have preserved sections, especially of the wall.”

While some Athens residents have incorporated ancient architecture into their modern houses, others have sought to hide these structures to avoid Greek bureaucracy and excavation delays. As Papadimitriou said, looking down at the houses of Plaka from the rooftop of his museum, “Almost everyone in the area here has ancient structural pieces in their homes.” Fafalios echoed this sentiment, concluding, “Here in Plaka, every courtyard hides something, and you learn to live with it. It’s part of your daily life.”