★★★★★ 5.0
Discover
First Cemetery of Athens
Workers are still uncovering ancient pottery shards in these 225 acres, remnants from when this was Athens' windmill district before 1837. You're standing in Greece's largest sculptural park - bigger than most European capitals can claim. What blows my mind is that 108 different artists created 2,077 individual tombs here, turning this Orthodox cemetery into an accidental art museum! See that white gleam everywhere? That's pure Pentelic marble - the same stone that built the Parthenon. Here's what locals know: Heinrich Schliemann, the guy who discovered Troy, is buried right behind those cypress trees in a tomb designed by Ernst Ziller, the architect who basically built half of neoclassical Athens. The real showstopper is Chalepas' "Sleeping Maiden" - a 19-year-old girl carved so realistically that Athenians in the 1800s would rush here just to see if she was breathing. The royal decree that created this place required it to be exactly 100 meters from the city center, on a hill with good wind flow. They literally measured it out to keep the dead properly ventilated!
Did You Know?
- The First Cemetery of Athens is often called the largest sculptural park in Greece, featuring over 2,000 tombs crafted by 108 artists, including masterpieces in Pentelic marble—the same material used for the Parthenon—making it a unique open-air museum of neoclassical, Byzantine, and even Egyptian-inspired funerary art.
- Among its famous residents are not only Greek heroes like Theodoros Kolokotronis, but also international figures such as archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann (discoverer of Troy) and architect Ernst Ziller, whose own tomb is a notable monument within the cemetery, reflecting the site’s prestige as a final resting place for both Greek and foreign luminaries.
- A hidden gem is the poignant sculpture 'I Koimomeni' ('The Sleeping Girl') by Yannoulis Chalepas, which depicts a young girl in eternal slumber and has become a symbol of the cemetery’s artistic heritage; local legend says that the sculpture was so lifelike, Chalepas’s own mother mistook it for a real sleeping child and tried to wake her.