Where to Stay in Maroúsi, Attica

What is Maroúsi known for?

The Athens Olympic Aquatic Centre and the Athens Olympic Tennis Centre put the sporting weight of the capital in this suburb, and the Athens Olympic Museum keeps the record of those games in the same quarter. Culture answers the sport. The Goulandris Natural History Museum, the Deste Foundation, the Spathario Museum and the Yannis Tsarouchis Foundation give Maroúsi a density of collections unusual for a place outside the historic centre of Athens.

What are the main landmarks in Maroúsi?

Omorfokklisia is the oldest thing standing. Around it the suburb has accumulated an unusual spread of small institutions, from the Goulandris Natural History Museum and the Drossinis Museum to the Deste Foundation, the Mihalarias Art Center and the Emphietsoglou Gallery Museum. Churches hold the older ground: the Agia Philothei monastery, the Church of Agios Georgios at Kalogreza, and the Ιερά Μονή Αγίας Ειρήνης Χρυσοβαλάντου.

The Olympic venues supply the modern scale. Kifissia keeps the Kifisia Roman Grave Monument.

What is the history of Maroúsi?

The name carries the oldest fact about the place. Maroúsi goes back to the ancient Athenian republic as Athmonon, one of the ten sub-cities of Athens, and its main temple was given to Amarysia Artemis, goddess of the hunt, whose cult travelled here from Amarynthos in Euboea. Amarysia became Amarousio.

The modern form of the name is a worn-down version of the goddess who was worshipped on this ground before any of the surrounding city existed. Christian building replaced the temple economy. Omorfokklisia, the Agia Philothei monastery, the Church of Agios Georgios at Kalogreza and the Agia Filothei church mark centuries in which this was farmland with churches rather than a suburb, while the Kifisia Roman Grave Monument nearby records the villa country that preceded them.

Athens was still a walk away. Wealthier households of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries later built out this side of the plain, leaving the Sikelianos house at Kifissia, the Kotsikas house and the Perrakis house among the streets. Sport rewrote the last stretch.

Olympic construction dropped the Athens Olympic Aquatic Centre and the Athens Olympic Tennis Centre onto the northeastern edge of the urban area, and the Athens Olympic Museum followed to hold the record of it. Collections arrived with the money: the Goulandris Natural History Museum, the Deste Foundation, the Spathario Museum, the Emphietsoglou Gallery Museum and the Yannis Tsarouchis Foundation all sit within the same municipality. Athmonon is now a city of Athens.

Where is Maroúsi?

Maroúsi covers the northeastern part of the Athens urban area, a municipality of roughly thirteen square kilometres with Kifissia on one side, Chalandri on another and Kalogreza on a third, all of them fused into the same continuous built-up plain. Open ground is rare. What survives of it lies around the churchyards and the grounds of the Olympic venues, which between them account for most of the unbuilt surface inside the boundary.

Attica frames the whole.

What is the climate of Maroúsi?

Summer heat gathers over the plain of Athens and drains slowly out of the northeastern suburbs, so afternoons in Maroúsi run hot enough that the Athens Olympic Aquatic Centre and the shaded museum courtyards do a fair share of the season's business. Mornings are the working hours. Winter in this temperate belt stays mild and short, with rain rather than snow, and the Omorfokklisia churchyard is as green in February as anything else in the municipality.

Evenings cool late.

How do you get to Maroúsi?

The Olympic complex is the landmark everything is measured from. Anyone coming out of central Athens crosses a continuous suburban fabric to reach Maroúsi, passing Chalandri or Kalogreza on the way in, and the run continues out to Kifissia beyond it without a break in the streets. Signs point to the venues first.

Journeys within the municipality are short enough to walk, though the distance between the Athens Olympic Tennis Centre and the museum quarter is a genuine walk rather than a stroll.