Almost four million people - one-third of the entire Greek population – live within the greater Athens area. This is a busy metropolis whose main problems are an excess of traffic and, in summer, the consequent smog.

The smog is a result of Athens’ attractive location, with hills on three sides trapping the smog.  The Aegean Sea lies to the south, beyond the port of Pireas, which merges with Athens. Many cities are described as being like collections of small villages, but Athens is a Greek village magnified.

The very existence of churches in the city shows that this is an unusual city, a city still on a human scale. Tiny Byzantine chapels force the modern traffic to detour around them, when in other cities they would long since have been demolished.

There are rapidly growing ethnic populations, such as Americans, Albanians, and peoples from Balkan states and the Asian subcontinent.