Agios Stefanos is about twenty-one kilometers northeast of central Athens, far enough out and high enough up to feel like a different climate from the baking plain below. Its built-up streets run together with the neighboring hill towns of Anoixi and Stamata to the south, but to the north and west the land rises into the Parnitha range, and the open country reasserts itself. The town is only nine kilometers from Marathon, the plain whose name became a byword for endurance. The A1 motorway, the great spine that runs from Athens all the way north to Thessaloniki and the border, passes just west of town, and a railway station on the same northbound line keeps Agios Stefanos tied to the rest of Greece.

Agios Stefanos has long been an Arvanite settlement, part of a deep and often overlooked layer of Attica's history. The Arvanites are a population that settled across central and southern Greece beginning in the late Middle Ages, speaking Arvanitika, a form of Albanian, while becoming thoroughly Greek Orthodox and, over generations, Greek in identity. Many of the villages ringing Athens, including this one, were Arvanite in origin, their older inhabitants once bilingual in a language now fading. It is easy to pass through the modern suburb and miss this entirely, but the Arvanite past is part of what made the hill towns north of Athens what they are, and it sits quietly in the place's name and lineage.

Rising from the high ground north of town is one of the tallest structures in all of Greece: the Athens ERA-1 transmitter, a steel lattice mast some 210 meters tall that broadcasts national radio across the Attic basin and beyond on the medium-wave band. From much of northern Athens it is a fixed point on the skyline, a slim tower marking exactly where the suburbs end. There is something fitting about a place that sits at the threshold of the city carrying its voice outward. The source of the Kifisos rises nearby, and the mast stands over it, the headwaters of Athens and one of the country's great antennas sharing the same windy hill.

Since the 2011 local-government reform that redrew Greece's map of municipalities, Agios Stefanos has been part of the municipality of Dionysos, and not merely part of it but its seat, the administrative center for a cluster of green hill towns named, fittingly, for the god of wine. The municipal unit covers a little over eight square kilometers of slopes and settlement. This is commuter country now, a place people climb to at the end of the day, trading the heat and density of the plain for cooler air and a view back down toward the city whose river starts in their own backyard.