According to the 2021 census, 643,450 people lived in the Athens municipality, making it the largest city in Greece. The second-most populated municipality, Thessaloniki, had approximately 319,050 inhabitants.

Greece GR: Population in Largest City data was reported at 3,157,451.000 Person in 2017. This records a decrease from the previous number of 3,159,302.000 Person for 2016. Greece GR: Population in Largest City data is updated yearly, averaging 3,062,740.500 Person from Dec 1960 (Median) to 2017, with 58 observations. The data reached an all-time high of 3,187,197.000 Person in 2001 and a record low of 1,813,686.000 Person in 1960. Greece GR: Population in Largest City data remains active status in CEIC and is reported by World Bank. The data is categorized under Global Database’s Greece – Table GR.World Bank.WDI: Population and Urbanization Statistics. Population in largest city is the urban population living in the country's largest metropolitan area.; ; United Nations, World Urbanization Prospects.; ;

Population in largest city in Greece was reported at 3154591 in 2024, according to the World Bank collection of development indicators, compiled from officially recognized sources. Greece - Population in largest city - actual values, historical data, forecasts and projections were sourced from the World Bank on June of 2025.

The Greek Inscriptions in Space and Time (GIST) dataset represents a comprehensive collection of ancient Greek inscriptions, enriched by temporal and spatial metadata. The dataset was created by the Social Dynamics in the Ancient Mediterranean Project (SDAM), 2019-2023, funded by the Aarhus University Forskningsfond Starting grant no. AUFF-E-2018-7-2.

The GIST dataset is mainly based on Greek inscriptions from the dataset of Searchable Greek Inscriptions [PHI](https://inscriptions.packhum.org/) and I.PHI dataset published by the Pythia Project (Sommerschield, T. et al. 2021). Furthermore, the attributes were enriched by LOD from the Trismegistos Project, Hansen and Nielsen's (2004) Inventory of Archaic and Classical Greek City-States and Hanson's (2016) Cities Database. The text of the inscriptions was lemmatised using the AGILe lemmatiser (de Graaf et al. 2022). The rights to these data are held by the respective original projects.

The GIST dataset consists of 217,863 inscriptions, enriched by 36 attributes. The individual inscriptions have been cleaned, preprocessed and enriched with additional data, such as date in a numeric format and geolocation. The origin of existing attributes is further described in columns 'dataset_source', 'attribute_source', 'created_by_script' and 'description' in the attached Metadata.csv or available via GitHub.

180,061 inscriptions have valid geospatial coordinates (the `geometry` attribute). This information is also used to determine the Roman urban context of each inscription (i.e. whether it is in the neighbourhood (i.e. within a 5000m buffer) of a large city, medium city, or small city or rural (>5000m to any type of city; see the attributes `urban_context`, `urban_context_city`, and `urban_context_pop`) and for their mapping on an ancient Greek polis (if there is any within the 5000m buffer; see the attributes `polis_context_name`, `polis_context_size`, and `polis_context_fame`).

131,677 inscriptions have a numerical date of origin expressed by means of an interval or singular year using the attributes `not_before` and `not_after`.

The scripts used to generate the dataset and their metadata are available via GitHub.

Formats

We publish the dataset in Parquet and GeoJSON file formats. A description of individual attributes is available in the Metadata.csv. Using `geopandas` library, you can load the data directly from Zenodo into your Python environment using the following command:

`GIST = gpd.read_file("https://zenodo.org/records/10127597/files/GIST_v1-0.geojson?download=1", driver="GeoJSON")`.

In R, the sfarrow and sf libraries hold tools, i.e., st_read_parquet(), read_sf(), to load a parquet and geojson, respectively, after you have downloaded the datasets locally.

Further reading:

• de Graaf, E., Stopponi, S., Bos, J., Peels-Matthey, S. & Nissim, M. (2022). AGILe: The First Lemmatizer for Ancient Greek Inscriptions. Proceedings of the 13th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2022), Marseille, 20-25 June 2022. pp. 5334–5344. http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2022/pdf/2022.lrec-1.571.pdf
• Nielsen, T. H., & Hansen, M. H. (Eds.) (2004). An Inventory of Archaic and Classical Poleis. Oxford University Press. Digitised data available through https://polis.stanford.edu
• Hanson, J. W. (2016). Cities Database (OXREP databases). Version 1.0. http://oxrep.classics.ox.ac.uk/databases/cities/. DOI: https://doi.org/10.5287/bodleian:eqapevAn8
• Kaše, V. & Glomb, T. (2022). The History of Graeco-Roman Religions in the Light of Cultural Evolution: A computational text analysis of ancient Greek inscriptions (submitted). [pdf]
• Kaše, V. & Glomb, T. (2023). Affluence, Agricultural Productivity and the Rise of Moralizing Religion in the Ancient Mediterranean. Religion, Brain & Behavior 13/2, 202-206. https://doi.org/10.1080/2153599X.2022.2065350 [link]
• Sommerschield, T., Assael, Y., Shillingford, B., Bordbar, M., Pavlopoulos, J., Chatzipanagiotou, M., Androutsopoulos, I., Prag, J., & de Freitas, N. (2021). I.PHI dataset: Ancient Greek inscriptions. https://github.com/sommerschield/iphi

Notes on spatial attributes

Machine-readable spatial point geometries are provided within the GeoJSON and parquet formats, as well as 'latitude' and 'longitude' columns, which contain geospatial decimal coordinates where these are known. Other attributes that contain spatial information have been generated from other sources. These include TMgeo_name, which provides the ID of the inscription location as presented in Trismegistos. Information on associated ancient cities within a 5 km buffer of inscription location is within the polis_ and urban_context_ attributes. 'polis-' attributes contain the name, identifier, and the rank of an associated polis from the Hansen/Nielsen's Inventory of Archaic and Classical Greek City-States (Oxford 2005), specifically a digital version of the inventory created by Joshua Ober and his team, hosted by the Stanford University library (https://polis.stanford.edu). Information on Roman-period urban contexts is present in the 'urban_context' attributes. These attributes, based on Hanson's 2016 list (http://oxrep.classics.ox.ac.uk/databases/cities/), include the rank of the associated city (the largest one within 5 km distance), ancient toponym, and population estimate.

List of all spatial attributes:

• 'geometry' - contains spatial point coordinate pair, ready for use in R or Python
• 'latitude' and 'longitude' - contain angular coordinates in decimal numeric format (EPSG4326)
• 'TMgeo_name' - id of geographic location for inscription findspot from Trismegistos
• 'polis_context_name' - the textual component of the ancient polis identifier from the digital Greek polis inventory
• 'polis_context_size' - 1 to 5 ranking, 5 is largest, based on HN estimates. Range 0-5. 1= 0-25 km sq.; 2 = 25-100 km sq, 3 = 100-200 km sq; 4 = 200-500 km sq; 5 = 500 km sq or more. 0 = no evidence for size. HN Appendix 9, with additions from Hansen 2008 and from Emily Mackil (per litt).
• 'polis_context_fame' - Number of columns of text in the HN inventory (by 1/8 column), as proxy for prominence of a given place. The range is 0.12-20.87. For display, the range will be reduced to a 1-5 ranking: 0.12-.037 = 1, 0.5-0.87 = 2, 1.0-2.87 = 3, 3.0-5.87 = 4, 6.0-20.87 = 5.
• 'urban_context' - specifies the rank of a Roman city within 5 km distance of an inscription (if one exists) on the basis of population estimated by Hanson 2016. The scale is: small, medium, large.
• 'urban_context_city' - contains the name (ancient toponym) of a city within 5 km distance of an inscription (if one exists). The city dataset is based on Hanson 2016. If the inscription's findspot fell within 5 km distance of multiple Roman cities, the largest was selected.
• 'urban_context_popest' - estimated population of the associated city from Hanson 2016, 2019

Disclaimer

Please be aware that the records in this dataset are aggregated from pre-existing sources, and additional attributes are generated on the basis of third-party data (see data provenance in the 'data_source' column in the Metadata.csv). SDAM did not create the original data, vouch for its accuracy, or guarantee that it is the most recent data available from the original data provider. Many variables contain values that are, by nature, approximate and may contain some inaccuracies or missing values. The data may also contain errors introduced by the data provider(s) and/or by SDAM. The openness of our processing scripts should facilitate the fast discovery of any such errors or discrepancies. We highly recommend checking attribute accuracy with the primary source, i.e. the *editio princeps* of the inscription in question. For derived data (e.g. urban_context), please review the associated scripts to understand their limitations.

Please contact the authors in case of any questions!

In collaboration with the American School of Classical Studies at Athens and the Hellenic Ministry of Culture, CyArk documented the mythical Peirene Fountain and the Temple of Apollo in the city of Ancient Corinth, Greece. Survey of the extant structures was conducted primarily with LiDAR and both terrestrial and aerial photogrammetry. The surviving frescoes within the Peirene Fountain were surveyed with an Artec scanner, which measures the 3D shape of a surface using pulsating light and a camera system. CyArk's digital documentation of the temple and fountain provided the ASCSA with accurate and precise data on the current state of preservation for both architectural complexes. In particular, it was important to record Peirene which is currently closed to the public due to concerns surrounding its preservation. This work was made possible through the generous support of the Macricostas Family Foundation. Ancient Corinth sits in a strategic position between land and sea and the ancient Greek city came to prominence by controlling area trade routes. An important cultural center throughout history, the city was known for its artistic innovations and the ruins today show numerous Greek, Roman, and Byzantine architectural features. The heart of ancient Corinth was the Fountain of Peirene, a freshwater spring featured in Greek mythology which also served as the primary source of water for Corinth. External Project Link: https://artsandculture.google.com/exhibit/1QLCbLZyVC8kKg Additional Info Link: https://cyark.org/projects/ancient-corinth

Greece GR: Population in Largest City: as % of Urban Population data was reported at 37.274 % in 2017. This records a decrease from the previous number of 37.402 % for 2016. Greece GR: Population in Largest City: as % of Urban Population data is updated yearly, averaging 41.153 % from Dec 1960 (Median) to 2017, with 58 observations. The data reached an all-time high of 45.213 % in 1975 and a record low of 37.226 % in 2011. Greece GR: Population in Largest City: as % of Urban Population data remains active status in CEIC and is reported by World Bank. The data is categorized under Global Database’s Greece – Table GR.World Bank.WDI: Population and Urbanization Statistics. Population in largest city is the percentage of a country's urban population living in that country's largest metropolitan area.; ; United Nations, World Urbanization Prospects.; Weighted average;

The number of inbound visits in Greece grew significantly in 2024 over the previous year, exceeding pre-pandemic levels. In 2024, the Attica region, which includes the city of Athens, recorded the most inbound visits, at roughly 8.8 million. Southern Aegean, Central Macedonia, and Crete followed in the ranking that year. What are the leading inbound travel markets in Greece? In 2024, Germany was the leading inbound tourist market in Greece, with over five million arrivals in the country. The United Kingdom reported the second-highest figure that year, with approximately 4.5 million arrivals. Overall, the total number of international travelers in Greece peaked at over 40 million in 2024. How many Greek tourists travel abroad? The number of outbound travelers from Greece grew by eight percent in 2024 over the previous year, totaling almost 6.7 million. Despite the annual increase, the volume of outbound travelers remained below pre-pandemic levels.

The main object of the doctoral dissertation is the study of the spatio-social transformations that occur in the city of Athens from the beginning of the 1990s until today, ie after the transformation of Greece from a "sending country" to a "host and transit" country of immigrants. In the context of the so-called "new migration" to the country and an ever-increasing "ethnocultural diversity", the main research questions of the dissertation are specialized in three parts. The first part of the questions concerns the access of immigrants to the residence and, in particular, the "housing routes" that follow until the access to the home. Do immigrants have access to private housing and, if so, to what extent? What is the profile of the immigrant owners, what are the characteristics of the properties they buy and through what mechanisms do they manage to become owners? The second part of the questions concerns the geographies of immigrants' access to private housing or, more simply, their spatial distribution in the city of Athens. In which neighborhoods and in which buildings of the city do the immigrant owners settle and, mainly, in what spatial relationship with the Greek inhabitants? In more specific terms, what is the degree of ethno-racial housing segregation in the city of Athens? Finally, apart from the spatial relations between Greeks and immigrants, the third part of the questions concerns the social relations of international coexistence that develop in the neighborhoods of Athens and range between relations of friendship, trust, and solidarity, but also relations of conflict, racism and intolerance. All the above questions are investigated through the combination of quantitative and qualitative research methods, with the basic tools of a statistical sample survey in the archive of the Athens Mortgage Office and a series of 20 semi-structured interviews by immigrant owners.

2,500 years ago, in August or September 480BCE, the Battle of Thermopylae saw a vastly outnumbered Greek force hold out against one of the largest armies ever assembled; in what has been romantically remembered as the last stand of the 300 Spartans. Background Around the turn of the fifth century BCE, the Achaemenid Empire (or the First Persian Empire) was the world's largest and most powerful kingdom, stretching from present-day China to the Balkans and North Africa. In 492 BCE, King Darius launched the first Persian invasion of Greece, as a means of punishing the Greek cities, who had previously aided an Ionian Greek rebellion against Darius in Asia Minor. After two years of war, an alliance of Greek states finally defeated the Persians at the Battle of Marathon in 490BCE. Ten years later, Darius' successor, Xerxes, sought revenge and launched the second Persian invasion of Greece, amassing one of the largest armies the world had ever seen. Ancient sources claimed that the Persian army numbered between 2.5 and four million, however most modern estimates claim that it was a few hundred thousand at most. As the Persian army swept southwards, most Greek states surrendered, although a small number united and sent their armies to head off the Persians at the narrow pass of Thermopylae, while their navies created a blockade at the straits of Artemisium. The build-up Modern estimates claim that there were around 7,000 Greek soldiers sent to defend the narrow pass at Thermopylae, which was described as a 15 meter stretch between sheer cliffs and treacherous waters. This force was led by the Spartans and their king***, Leonidas; Sparta had the only professional army in Greece, however the battle coincided with a period of sacred religious and Olympic celebrations when fighting was not permitted, meaning Sparta sent just 300 veteran warriors to Thermopylae. Other states also sent relatively small numbers for similar reasons, as well as their reluctance to send their armies so far to the north. Despite these vastly inferior numbers, the Greek style of fighting was much better suited to the terrain at Thermopylae. Persian armies favored mobile battles, using archers to inflict most damage before sending in a combination of lightly armored soldiers and cavalry units to clean up remaining forces. The Greeks, however, used heavily armored hoplites in compact, phalanx formations, and preferred close-quarters combat. Battle of Thermopylae When the Persians reached Thermopylae, Xerxes waited four days before attacking, assuming that the Greeks would disperse at the sight of his army; when they did not, Xerxes ordered them to surrender their weapons, to which Leonidas famously replied "molon labe" or "come and take them". Xerxes then launched his attack, however, his archers inflicted little damage against the heavily armored Greeks and their heavy, bronze shields. Persian foot soldiers and cavalry, including the professional, heavily armored "Immortals", then suffered heavily at the hands of the Greek defenders. It was only after two days of fighting when the Persians gained the upper hand; a local shepherd, seeking reward, led a Persian force around a hidden path in the mountains, where they outflanked the Greeks. Surrounded, Leonidas ordered most of his forces to fall back, while the Spartans, Thebans, Thespians and helots remained. Eventually, King Leonidas and the rear guard were defeated as they protected their comrades' retreat (there are some reports of the Thebans surrendering). Despite losing the battle, the actions of the Greeks delayed the Persian advance into Greece, and bought their comrades enough time to regroup. The Greek armies and navies were then able to organize further defenses, and eventually defeat the invasion at the battles of Salamis and Plataea. By winning this war, the Greeks prevented the Persians from extending their empire and influence across Europe, in a war that likely altered the course of human history and development for all time.

The HEAT-ALARM Urban Morphology and Environment Database (UMED) provides ultra-high-resolution data that characterize the landscape, form and function of the five highest populated cities in Greece (Athens, Thessaloniki, Larissa, Patras, Heraklion) for integration in the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model, versions 4.3-4.4.1 (Skamarock et al., 2021), in order to enable the highly-resolved numerical weather prediction (NWP) over the targeted urban areas as part of the weather forecasting component of the project's heat-health warning system (HHWS). These data include: (a) terrain elevation based on the 3-arc-sec (~ 90 m) horizontal grid resolution SRTM (shuttle radar topography mission) data, version 4.1 (Jarvis et al., 2008), (b) land use/land cover (LU/LC) at 100 m spatial resolution, constructed by combining CORINE land cover data (CLC – Feranec et al., 2016) and Local Climate Zone (LCZ – Stewart and Oke, 2012) classification, and (c) city-specific surface and urban canopy properties (e.g., width of streets, albedo of roofs) for each LCZ class, assigned in look-up tables (URBPARM_LCZ.TBL). Along with UMED, the GEOGRID.TBL.ARW_HEAT-ALARM is provided for assisting the WRF implementation with the above data.

Considering that such finely detailed data have been incorporated in modeling studies only in Athens so far (e.g. Giannaros et al., 2014; Agathangelidis et al., 2019; Giannaros et al., 2018, 2023), the development and distribution of UMED in the framework of HEAT-ALARM constitutes an important step towards the creation of an open-access national urban dataset in Greece that can be used for accurately describing and modeling the urban environments under various applications.

More information on the data generation and their use within the WRF-urban modeling framework can be found at: https://osf.io/p2qrd.

Compared to the previous version, this version includes minor bug fixes related to the look-up tables providing the surface and urban canopy properties (URBPARM_LCZ_HEAT-ALARM.zip).

References

Agathangelidis, I., Cartalis, C., Santamouris, M., 2019. Integrating Urban Form, Function, and Energy Fluxes in a Heat Exposure Indicator in View of Intra-Urban Heat Island Assessment and Climate Change Adaptation. Clim. . https://doi.org/10.3390/cli7060075

Feranec, J., Soukup, T., Hazeu, G., & Jaffrain, G. (Eds.), 2016. European Landscape Dynamics: CORINE Land Cover Data (1st ed.). CRC Press. https://doi.org/10.1201/9781315372860

Giannaros, C., Agathangelidis, I., Papavasileiou, G., Galanaki, E., Kotroni, V., Lagouvardos, K., Giannaros, T.M., Cartalis, C., Matzarakis, A., 2023. The extreme heat wave of July–August 2021 in the Athens urban area (Greece): Atmospheric and human-biometeorological analysis exploiting ultra-high resolution numerical modeling and the local climate zone framework. Sci. Total Environ. 857, 159300. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scitotenv.2022.159300

Giannaros, C., Nenes, A., Giannaros, T.M., Kourtidis, K., Melas, D., 2018. A comprehensive approach for the simulation of the Urban Heat Island effect with the WRF/SLUCM modeling system: The case of Athens (Greece). Atmos. Res. 201, 86–101. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1016/j.atmosres.2017.10.015

Giannaros, T.M., Melas, D., Daglis, I.A., Keramitsoglou, I., 2014. Development of an operational modeling system for urban heat islands: An application to Athens, Greece. Nat. Hazards Earth Syst. Sci. 14, 347–358. https://doi.org/10.5194/nhess-14-347-2014

Jarvis, A., Reuter, H.I., Nelson, A., Guevara, E., 2008. Hole-filled SRTM for the globe, version 4, available from the CGIAR-CSI SRTM 90 m database (http://srtm.csi.cgiar.org)

Skamarock, W.C., Klemp, J.B., Dudhia, J., Gill, D.O., Liu, Z., Berner, J., Wang, W., Power, J.G., Duda, M.G., Backer, D.M., Huang, X.Y., 2021. A Description of the Advanced Research WRF Model Version 4.3. NCAR Technical Note (NCAR/TN-556+STR), Boulder, Colorando, USA. Available online: http://dx.doi.org/10.5065/1dfh-6p97

Stewart, I.D., Oke, T.R., 2012. Local climate zones for urban temperature studies. Bull. Am. Meteorol. Soc. 93, 1879–1900. https://doi.org/10.1175/BAMS-D-11-00019.1

GR：最大城市人口在12-01-2017达3,157,451.000人，相较于12-01-2016的3,159,302.000人有所下降。GR：最大城市人口数据按年更新，12-01-1960至12-01-2017期间平均值为3,062,740.500人，共58份观测结果。该数据的历史最高值出现于12-01-2001，达3,187,197.000人，而历史最低值则出现于12-01-1960，为1,813,686.000人。CEIC提供的GR：最大城市人口数据处于定期更新的状态，数据来源于World Bank，数据归类于全球数据库的希腊 – Table GR.World Bank.WDI：人口和城市化进程统计。

The annual number of passengers of the Athens streetcar network reported an overall decline between 2015 and 2019. In 2020, amid the COVID-19 pandemic, the ridership of the Athens tram lines dropped by 54 percent and stood at approximately six million passengers. Athens is the capital and largest city of Greece.

The annual number of passengers of the Athens' three-lined subway system remained almost stable between 2015 to 2019. In 2020, amid the COVID-19 pandemic, the ridership of the metro network dropped by 44 percent, compared to 2019 levels. Athens is the capital and largest city in Greece.