Maroussi is two places at once. Most people know it as the glass-and-steel northern Athens of office towers, the Olympic stadium and the malls along the motorway. But climb the hill from the M1 station and you find the other Maroussi — Amarousion, the old village named for the goddess Artemis Amarysia, a town of potters and water-carriers that Athens swallowed but never quite digested.
Start beside Panagia Nerantziotissa, the bitter-orange church by the station, and walk up into the core. Plateia Evterpis still bends the way the old lanes did; take a Greek coffee at a kafeneio under the trees. The grand 19th-century Evangelistria — the church of the Annunciation — anchors the village, its dome riding over the low roofs; step into the cool nave.
Then wander the neoclassical streets, single-storey houses with tiled roofs and marble lintels wedged between the apartment blocks. Maroussi made the water jars Athens drank from; a few potters' marks survive in the lower streets. End on the village's strangest boast: Spyros Louis, the local water-carrier who won the 1896 marathon, whose stadium stands just downhill. Then the M1 home.
