Athens Guide: Kolonaki and Lykavittos
From the
National
Gardens
, if you cross Vassilias Sophias street and
continue up the hill from Irodou Atikou past
the beautiful mansion that houses the
Benaki
Museum
, you will be in Kolonaki Square, one of the
most famous and enjoyable places to sip
coffee, watch people and eat in the cafes that
line the street and remind many people of
Paris. The neighborhood is full of cafes and
expensive shops, fancy restaurants and fancy
people and shopping in this area is like
shopping in the finest areas of New York or
Paris. In the winter giant heaters are placed
outside and during the summer they have some
kind of hook-up that blows cold air through
some tubes into the covered area on the
street. During the Greek Civil War Kolonaki
and Syntagma were the only parts of Athens not
under the control of the communists. Check out the
Kioupi restaurant across the
street from the Square. It is one of the last of the working-class
tavernas in the neighborhood. It's not exactly working-class in
the blue-collar sense, but guys in suits and ties work too.
Walk past the cafes and turn left up
Anagnastopoulo at the top of the square and go
right on Iraklitou, then up the steps and
through the small park. If you have kids you
can leave them in the playground while you
take a seat at the Ouzerie in Platia Dexameni.
This is one of the best spots in Athens, high
enough to be breezy and cool, with excellent
food. Very nice place to go for lunch and one
of the few places in Athens where you can
share your lunch with a rooster and some
chickens.
You can get an ice cold beer here and a plate
of shrimp. Excellent sausages, salads and very
friendly service. One of my favorite places
for ouzo too. And where else in Athens can you
be entertained by a goat? A live one
anyway.
Dexameni means cistern which is what the
square sits upon. It used to be the water
supply for all of Athens. There is also an
outdoor movie theater that shows mostly
English language films.
Right
across the street from the park is the Hotel
Saint George Lycabettus, one of the best
hotels in Athens. Great views, a swimming pool
and excellent rates in August make this a
hotel a favorite of regular travelers to
Greece.
The Gennadeion Library, across from the
American School of Archaeology following
Dinocratos street, contains the best collection of
Hellenism in the world as well as the notebooks
and letters of Henrich Schleiman, the records of
Ali Pasha, the despot of Epirus, and the papers of
Nobel Prize-winning poets George Seferis and
Odysseus Elyetis.
I
usually don't go any further but if you are
adventurous keep walking uphill on Ploutariou
street until you reach the tree-line. You are now
in the wilds of Mount Lycabettus. You can take the
Funicular Railway to the top or you can walk.
Whatever you do it's worth it because at the
summit is a church with a spectacular view of
Athens, the Acropolis, and the mountains
surrounding the city.
From Mount Lycabettus
you can see the ships in Piraeus, the Aegean
sea, and on a clear day the islands beyond, all
the way to the mountains of the Peloponessos.
It's worth being here for sunset and there
just happens to be a cafe-ouzerie up there
too. On the back side of the mountain is an
outdoor amphitheater. Read the back page of
the Athens News to find out if anyone of
interest is playing. It's one of the finest
places to see a concert and you never know who
will be performing up there. Anyone from
Leonard Cohen to Peter Gabriel. I saw James
Brown there one summer! You can also take a taxi
and for those doing the Athens tour with George
the Famous Taxi Driver Lycabettus should be included.
In
Edmund Keeley's excellent book
Inventing
Paradise: The Greek Journey 1937-47
he
describes Kolonaki:
One neighborhood that almost every Athenian knows
to a degree is Kolonaki, or little column, named
for the column once standing alone on the edge of
town but now in a busy square close to the city
center. Kolonaki used tobe regarded as the
ritziest if most conservative part of Athens to
live in, until too much traffic and polluted air
bagain to tarnish its upper-class image, though it
always had a bohemian fringe around the slope of
Lycabettus, where writers and artists, both
foreign and domestic could find fairly cheap,
congenial homes in the few two and three story
houses left over from the early days when the
streets were unpaved. The square that used to
provide open-air tea and coffee for the elite in a
paved figure-of-eight island known affectionately
as "the Kolo Bidet" (the Ass Bidet) has now been
cleared away to make room for the young who cruise
in on motorcycles to eat pizza at the new mall or
hang out over a drink to see who else may show up
for a revved-up move into some serious nightlife
elsewhere. And very recently some Athenians on the
rise who chose to live in the distant suburbs
where the air is cleaner and the parking easy have
begun to come back to Kolonaki because they miss
the sidewalk cafes and restaurants, however
upgraded, where the talk about politics and films
and trips to the islands still has some wit in it,
and where the boutiques that have taken over the
ground floor apartments on street after street are
as classy as any in Europe.
For
more about Edmund Keely see
books
See my photos at Lykavittos: The View from the Top