Pietro Pecco's video: Athens landscape @ Athens Attica Central Greece Greece Europe

Athens is a Greek municipality of 655 780 inhabitants, capital of the Hellenic Republic, capital of the peripheral unit of Central Athens and the periphery of Attica. It has an area of 39 km², but the metropolitan area understood as Greater Athens has an extension of 412 km² with 4 013 368 inhabitants, and is thus the seventh largest conurbation in the European Union, and the fifth largest capital populous Union. Traditionally the protector of the city is the goddess Athena, depicted both on the coat of arms and on the city flag. A cosmopolitan metropolis and economic, financial, industrial and cultural center of Greece, it has considerable importance at a European level, but also worldwide. It is known throughout the world for the birth of democracy, for being the seat of Plato's academy and Aristotle's high school, as well as being the birthplace of Socrates, Pericles, Sophocles and many other philosophers and important figures of antiquity . Among the oldest cities in the world, it was a thriving polis and is considered the cradle of Western civilization. In the 21st century it has been at the center of worldwide attention for having successfully organized the Games of the XXVIII Olympiad in 2004 and for the inauguration of the new Acropolis museum in 2009, which reopened the debate regarding the Parthenon Marbles . From April 2018 to April 2019, Athens is the world capital of books while in 1985 it was named European city of culture. The city is also the seat of the Holy Synod of the Church of Greece, at the Petraki Monastery.