The American College of Greece does not look its age. Its main campus in Agia Paraskevi, a quiet northeastern suburb of Athens, spreads across sixty-four acres of pine and modern buildings. But the institution traces its founding to 1875 - not in Greece at all, but in Smyrna, a cosmopolitan port of the Ottoman Empire that no longer exists by that name. To follow this college from there to here is to follow one of the twentieth century's great upheavals: the burning of a city, the uprooting of a people, and the long work of rebuilding a school from its ashes.
It began as a mission. In 1875, American missionaries of the United Church of Christ opened a school for girls in Smyrna, on the Aegean coast of Anatolia. Its first dean was Minnie Mills. Smyrna in those years was a dense weave of Greek, Turkish, Armenian, and Jewish life - prosperous, polyglot, and, as it turned out, fragile. The Greco-Turkish War of 1919 to 1922 ended in catastrophe for the city's Christian population, and in the population exchange that followed, the school's world was swept away. What had been a quiet girls' academy in a thriving port became a refugee institution in need of a new home.
The school relocated to Athens in 1923, invited by the Greek prime minister Eleftherios Venizelos, and re-established itself at Paleo Phalero on the city's southern coast, before moving to its own campus at Hellenikon in 1932. It became co-educational in 1932 and took the name The American College of Greece in 1962. War interrupted again: during the Axis occupation, the German command seized its premises and used them as a hospital. The college reopened afterward and eventually moved to its present campus at Agia Paraskevi, where it has stayed. The school it had founded in Smyrna survives too, as Pierce - the college's primary and secondary division, which moved to Agia Paraskevi in 1965 and admitted boys for the first time in 1982.
Today the college is really three institutions sharing a history. Deree, named for the benefactor Socrates Derehanis, is the undergraduate and graduate heart of the place, enrolling roughly five thousand students across dozens of programs in business, the liberal arts, and the fine arts, accredited by an American higher-education body. Pierce is the primary and secondary school, now teaching pre-kindergarten through twelfth grade on a newer East Campus in nearby Spata. Alba Graduate Business School, founded in 1992 by Greek industry and management associations and merged into the college in 2011, runs MBAs and master's programs from downtown Athens. One thread of continuity runs through all of them: an institution that has refused, across a century and a half, to stop teaching.
An institution this old and this visible does not stand apart from the debates of its moment. In 2025 the college drew sharp criticism over faculty cooperation with Israeli authorities during the war in Gaza, and its own students pressed the administration hard. That August, Deree canceled a planned educational visit to Israel after a campus backlash, and a criminology conference hosted on its grounds became another flashpoint, with the Athens municipality and a Greek university withdrawing their support. For a school born of an American mission on Ottoman soil, shaped by one century's forced migrations and tested by another's, such arguments are perhaps inevitable. A campus that has outlived empires remains, very much, a place where the present is contested out loud.
The main campus sits in Agia Paraskevi, northeastern Athens, at roughly 38.0025° N, 23.8295° E, on the lower slopes east of Mount Hymettus. The mountain's long ridge is the dominant visual landmark, with the suburb spread along its eastern foot. Athens International Airport (LGAV) lies about 17 km to the southeast - the college is closer to the airport than to central Athens. Clear, bright conditions are typical over the Attic basin in summer.