What is the capital of Greece?

Athens was chosen as the capital of the modern Greek state in the 1830s, and at the time it was a startling choice. After the war of independence the town beneath the Acropolis was a small, war-damaged settlement of a few thousand people, much less substantial than several rival cities. It was picked for its symbolism, because the classical past was central to how the new kingdom presented itself and to why European powers had supported the cause, and the city was then rebuilt around that idea, with neoclassical public buildings laid out by Bavarian and Danish architects on a planned street grid below the ancient citadel. The population grew enormously in the twentieth century, especially after the exchange of populations with Turkey in the 1920s brought hundreds of thousands of refugees, which is why so much of the city is dense mid-century apartment building rather than nineteenth-century planning.

Nafplio in the Peloponnese served as the first capital of independent Greece before the seat moved to Athens.