Kifissia


Kifisia or Kifissia is a municipality of Athens agglomeration, Attica, Greece and a large northern suburb. It is mainly accessed via Kifisias Avenue, starting from central Athens and ending in the suburb of Nea Erythraia. It has traditionally been considered one of the most affluent suburbs of Athens and has been home to major Greek political families.

Municipality

The municipality of Kifisia was formed during the 2011 local government reform by the merger of the Ekali, Kifisia and Nea Erythraia municipalities, that became municipal units of the larger administrative entity. The municipality has an area of 35.100 km2 and the municipal unit of Kifisia, the largest, 25.937 km2.

History

Antiquity

Ancient Athenian tradition named the mythical king of Athens, Cecrops I, as the founder of Cephisia, one of the 12 cities of Attica, created as a way to unite several disparate settlements into cohesive entities as to allow unitary administration, laws and governance under one ruler. This would place its founding sometime in the Mycenaean era, part of the Bronze Age, before even the time of king Theseus.
Cephisia was a separate deme of the ancient Athenian state, home to the renowned dramatist Menander and a hub for the Athenian elite due to its milder climate, abundance of waters and distance from the city. It was centred around where it stands today, but covered a smaller area than today's enlarged municipality. The greatest housing density seemed to have been in Kato Kifisia, west of today's Kifisias Avenue, attested by archaeological findings that include a 200-person graveyard. Findings are sparser east of the modern avenue and north of the Pyrna river, where digs have revealed traces of the ancient eastbound road network, farmhouses, huts, a second, smaller graveyard and the local gymnasium.
Cephisia had already become a famous retreat of philosophers by the reign of the Roman emperor Hadrian when the wealthy Herodes Atticus of Marathon built the Villa Cephisia as his personal estate, spanning a large area right in the middle of the town, roughly between the river and where Kifisia Grove stands today. It was also common for Herodes to provide free instruction in philosophy for selected youths from Athens. Funerary monuments, most likely belonging to Herodes' kin, still remain in Platanou Square. Herodes also beautified a sanctuary to the Nymphs in a cave close to the banks of the Pyrna, home to a local oracle in earlier periods.

Medieval Era (335-1456)

Historical information about Medieval Kifisia remains sparse and anecdotal in nature, following Athens into at best provincial importance during the Byzantine period. The remains of a church dedicated to the Virgin of the Swallow is associated with a folk tale about a battle fought there between local people and unspecified "invaders". This chapel is a rare example of a monastery church originally provided with a fireplace.
Continuing the tradition of Kifisia being a spot of repose for the wealthy, after the capture of Attica and its incorporation into the Duchy of Athens in the aftermath of the Fourth Crusade the village hosted the large estates of the feudal Frankish aristocracy, mostly between Profitis Ilias hill and the Alonia area.

Ottoman Era (1456-1821)

In 1456, three years after the fall of Constantinople to the Ottomans in 1453, Turkish general and governor of Thessaly Turahanoğlu Ömer Bey seized Athens and all its surrounding areas, expelling the ruling Acciaioli dynasty from Attica. The conquerors seized land for themselves across Attica and Kifisia was not left by the wayside, as supported by claims of an Ottoman governor eventually constructing his own tower in the vicinity and of a mosque being built where Platanou Square now stands.
Kifisia was visited by the Turkish traveller Evliya Çelebi in 1667 on his journey to Athens. He described the hamlet first hand:

19th and early 20th centuries

With the Ottoman exit from southern Greece in the wake of the war of Independence in the 1820s, several formerly Muslim properties were taken by the rebelling Greeks, being seized after their owners fled, bought at a pittance or handed out by the Greek state after the war. Attica and Kifisia in particular was no exception. An example is the case of Georgios Kourtis, a Kifisia local who fought with general Georgios Karaiskakis in Attica and was rewarded with the Ottoman commander's former house. Kifisia thus became a fully Christian town, similarly to innumerable other places across the newly-independent nation.
For the same reasons since antiquity, the distant hamlet attracted the wealthy from early on. King Otto of Greece, most notably, had a house on what is now Othonos street and often went horse riding in the settlement's empty vicinity. The village was home to an Arvanitika-speaking community, however due to its proximity to Athens, it soon underwent a language shift, similarly to the city of Athens itself, which also saw its local dialect of Greek rapidly fade out.
The popularity of Kifisia somewhat faded during the mid-19th century, when the practice of brigandage reached endemic proportions and brigands like Christos "Davelis" Natsios and Loukas "Kakarapis" Beloulias ravaged the countryside of Attica and Boeotia with near impunity. However, the gradual suppression of brigandage and the arrival of the railway in 1885 ushered in a period of great development.
It gradually became fashionable for wealthy Athenian families to acquire or build their summer estates in Kifisia, continuing the historical trend, and keen social competition led to the creation of a unique architectural ambiance, as villas in ever more exotic styles proliferated. For those unable to afford a domicile of their own, many opulent hotels were built by the 1920s, where the slightly less affluent could spend the holiday months rubbing shoulders with their social betters. The interwar period only helped raise the suburb's prominence, when the leaders of the two main rival political parties frequented different hotels in the town together with their most notable supporters. The suburb by then was already home to several highly important figures of Greek history ever since the turn of the 20th century: renowned army officer Pavlos Melas in an earlier period, businessman and mayor of Athens Emmanouil Benakis, writer Penelope Delta and nationalist politician and future dictator Ioannis Metaxas were only a few of them.

World War II and Civil War

Following the liberation of Greece from Axis occupation in 1944, the British Royal Air Force ill-advisedly made its headquarters in the area of Kefalari, spread across three neighboring hotels. With the outbreak of the Greek Civil War in Athens in December 1944, the hotels were ambushed on the night of 16-17 December, besieged, then forced to surrender, with the prisoners marched across the mountains into northern Greece; being released in Trikala only after a truce had been arranged.

Geography

Kifisia is situated in central Attica, in the northernmost part of the Attica basin, spanning the mostly flat area between the Penteli mountain range to its east and the Kifisos to the west. It is situated 12 km northeast of Athens city centre. The built-up area of Kifisia is continuous with those of the neighbouring suburbs of Lykovrysi, Nea Erythraia, Marousi and Pefki. The main neighborhoods of Kifisia are Adames, Ano Kifisia, Kato Kifisia, Kefalari, Nea Kifisia and Politeia. It is a leafy suburb with parks and small parcels of woodland, which serves as a central point of appeal.
The main thoroughfare is Kifisias Avenue, connecting Kifisia with central Athens and the A6 toll motorway. Kifisia station is the north terminus of Line 1 of the Athens metro system.

Climate

Kifisia has a hot-summer Mediterranean climate with hot, dry summers and cool, rainy winters. Owing to its slightly higher elevation and increased foliage in comparison to Athens, Kifisia, similarly to other areas on the northernmost edges of the Athenian plain, has a significantly lower mean annual temperature than downtown Athens and the coastal parts of the urban area, according to the 1956-2010 annual average of the adjacent weather station of Tatoi, though this has slightly increased in recent years.
Yearly precipitation totals around 450 mm, one of the highest values for the whole Athens basin, mostly due to the higher amounts of precipitation received caused by Lake-effect rain or snow from the Aegean Sea to the north-east in the winter months and the somewhat more frequent occasional summer thunderstorms, when compared to the rest of the city. Snow in particular, though not excessively common, can cause heavy disruption to daily life as it occasionally falls in large amounts during short periods. Notably, snow accumulation had reached 80 cm during a severe snowstorm on 4–6 January 2002.

Economy and Museums

, Aegean Airlines, Barcleys, BP, Eurobank Ergasias, Eltrak, Ellaktor, Kioleides, Ferrari Metaxa, Metro S.A., Volvo and others have their head office in Kifisia.
The Goulandris Museum of Natural History is situated in the heart of Kifissia and has collections from the natural wildlife of the Greek territory.

Sports

Kifissia has several sport clubs in different sports. The most notable among them are ZAON, a club with many panhellenic titles in Greek women's volleyball, Kifissia AC, which plays almost constantly in men's volleyball first division, and Nea Kifissia B.C. that plays in basketball first division.
The football team of Kifissia is Kifissia F.C. and it participates in Super League Greece. Kifissia is also the seat of Athina 90, AOH Hymettus, and Iraklis Kifissias has a presence in A1 Womens' Category, with more than 200 athletes in Iraklis Kifissias Volleyball Academy.

Historical population

YearMunicipal unitMunicipality
195113,124-
196114,193-
197120,082-
198131,876-
199139,08456,160
200145,01566,484
201147,33271,259
202148,70072,878