For the history:

Piraeus is the largest port in the country. A city wronged too much by too many.

In Piraeus you can travel in time simply by changing a building block, as if its urban spread and the endless traffic jam that has prevailed in its streets have altered its traditional image, every 200 meters or more something will have left out to resemble the long and his particular story.

For Piraeus, everything revolves around 2 axes: its port and Olympiakos. It may be the only city in the world that has “two hearts”.

“If you think that what I’m doing does not hurt me, you are wrong.”

(Melina Merkouri)

The story:

Piraeus. A City Legend

“The relationship of native Piraeus with their city is purely erotic, and literally embraces the whole meaning of the word love.

Piraeus has been a crossroads of the East and West since ancient times. Perfectly connected to the sea and endowed by nature with a beautiful and safe harbor. His story looks somewhat like a fairytale – it contains a fascinating adventure between the centuries – with periods of great prosperity – but also decadence.

Piraeus was inhabited – according to testimonies, around 2,600 BC. and until the beginning of the 5th century BC, – when Themistocles used it and highlighted it as the sea port of Athens because the Athenians had until then used Faliro and had their export trade in Prasies – the current Porto Rafti. With the works of Themistocles and Pericles, Piraeus became an exemplary harbor for the time, gathering the introductory and transit trade of Athenian democracy and became the center of economic life not only of Athens but of Greece as a whole.

The development course of Piraeus was parallel to that of Athens and followed it throughout the golden age of Pericles.

But after the Peloponnesian war, in 431 BC, it would accept the first serious blows and begin a slow but steady course towards the definitive decline that lasted for about 15 centuries.

In 1318 AD. Piraeus changed its ancient name. It was originally Porto Leone and Porto Draco by the Franks and in 1456 by the Turks Aslan port – which means the port of the lion, due to the marble statue that existed and which it sculpted and carried in 1688 – during his campaign – Frazeco Morosini in Venice Navy. In the place where the statue existed was built in 1869 the well-known building with the famous clock – which originally housed the stock market and since 1885 the town hall of Piraeus was installed – (in 1968 the clock was shattered in one night by the then municipal authority and removed from it Piraeus a big part of his story).

Throughout the Ottoman occupation, Piraeus lived in absolute abandonment and desolation. At the harbor, commercial transport and transactions were minimal and totally insignificant.

Later and in later history two chronologies mark the beginning of change from decline to growth. In 1829 and 1835. The first inhabitants of Piraeus arrived in Piraeus in 1829, including Giannakos Tzelepis – known until today as his name has one of the piers of the Piraeus Port. And in 1835 the Municipality of Piraeus was founded by royal decree, with the first mayor Kiriakos Serphiotis from Hydra, who swore on December 23, 1835, at the then-monastery of Saint Spyridon.