The land tilts up toward Hymettus, the long forested ridge that walls off Athens to the east. Agia Paraskevi sits near its northern edge, about nine kilometers from the city center, its built-up streets running seamlessly into neighboring Cholargos, Chalandri, and Gerakas until you cannot tell where one suburb ends and the next begins. Around the central square the town fans out into seven districts with names like Kontopefko and Paradeisos. Mesogeion Avenue, the great artery to central Athens, threads through it, and metro lines stitch it into the wider city. It is the kind of place that grew up fast and pressed itself right against the mountain it was built beneath.

Within living memory this was farmland. Agia Paraskevi belonged to the community of Chalandri until 1931, became its own community that year, and was made a full municipality only in 1963. Photographs of the village before the 1950s show fields, not apartment blocks. Then Athens swelled outward, and the farmers' village filled in with concrete, the same suburban tide that washed over the whole northern Attic plain after the war. What makes Agia Paraskevi distinctive is what landed here as it grew: the Demokritos research center with its reactor, the Greek Ministry of Agriculture, and an unusual concentration of schools that would give the town an international reputation out of proportion to its size.

In 1993 the suburb fought its government and, for a moment, won. The state planned to cut a ring road, the A62, straight along the flank of Hymettus, an exposed highway that would fell a swath of trees and pour traffic noise over the neighborhoods below. Residents asked instead for a covered road. The government refused and sent the bulldozers up the mountainside. That April, thousands of people climbed the slope and stood in front of the machines, forcing the drivers off until police arrived to clear them. The road was eventually built and finished in 2001, covered only along a short stretch above Deree College. The mountain was changed, but the people of Agia Paraskevi had made the state come up the hill to do it.

For its size, Agia Paraskevi educates an extraordinary number of people. Alongside a full public system, the town is home to the American College of Greece, whose Deree and Pierce divisions trace back to a school founded by American women in Smyrna in 1875, making it the oldest and largest U.S.-accredited college in Europe. A short distance away stands the Lycée Franco-Hellénique Eugène Delacroix, running dual French and Greek tracks from preschool through high school. The municipality's own public schools include institutions for the hearing impaired at several levels, a quiet commitment in a country where free public education at every stage is written into the constitution. The local football club, formally Agia Paraskevi F.C., is known to its devoted fans simply as 'Santa.'