Ancient Athens after the classical period is still little known even to the Greeks. Alexander the Great visited it once in his youth (let's perhaps accept that his equestrian statue, created by sculptor Giannis Pappas, erected in Athens in 2019, pays tribute to that visit). But little has entered the collective consciousness regarding the daily life of the city for many centuries. To be precise, Athens remains unknown to the average citizen of our era from classical antiquity until the early 19th century, with the exception of the peaks of Emperor Hadrian's building program and the Byzantine fragments of the 10th and 11th centuries. However, the city lived continuously and was a destination for as long as the Philosophical School remained operational until the 6th century. And it was a city with permanent inhabitants that inevitably experienced cycles of prosperity and decline, but never ceased to be a place of worship.

This sacred dimension of Athens, rekindled in modern times by European travelers, within the broader context of Romanticism and Classicism and the attraction exerted by its ruins, runs through the idea of the city from antiquity to the present day. It is remarkable to consider that all interpretations and approaches to Athens originate and converge on aspects of the sacred and stem from expressions of intangible culture. The new Greek state organizes around the idea of Athens as the capital a national founding myth.

But Athens remains unknown. It may sound paradoxical, but it is an objective condition that we are unable to reconstruct, even in our imagination, its past in a long and dark tunnel of centuries. We find it difficult to imagine Athenian daily life in 205 BC, 2 AD, 234, 401, 600, 1311, 1688. This tradition of Athens in darkness, in the black hole of memory, was a deliberate choice to symbolically bridge classical antiquity with the modern 19th century.