The school was born from an unusual partnership. In 1925, a group of prominent Greeks joined forces with American philhellenes, lovers of Greece, to build a new kind of institution that would teach in both Greek and English. Among the founders was Emmanuel Benakis, a retired businessman, former minister, and former mayor of Athens, whose name also marks the Benaki Museum and the school's main hall. On the American side stood figures like Bert Hodge Hill, director of the American School of Classical Studies. The result was a school incorporated in both Greece and the State of New York at once, a bridge built deliberately across the Atlantic and never taken down.

The school opened in a rented building on Androu Street in the heart of Athens and moved to Psychiko in 1929. That same year, the Benaki Hall was dedicated by none other than Eleftherios Venizelos, the towering Greek statesman of the era and an ardent supporter of the project. His dedication speech made a quiet argument that still defines the place: private schools, he said, enjoy a freedom public ones lack, and from that freedom comes real progress. He expected Athens College to deliver exactly that. He was, by almost any measure, right.

The alumni list is almost comically distinguished. Beyond the prime ministers, there is the shipping magnate Stavros Niarchos, the computer scientist Michael Dertouzos who ran MIT's Laboratory for Computer Science, the Princeton philosopher Alexander Nehamas, and the novelist Apostolos Doxiadis. More recently the tennis player Maria Sakkari, once ranked third in the world, came up through its halls. For a single school in a single suburb to produce heads of government, shipping dynasties, and globally cited scholars in such concentration is not luck. It is what happens when a country's elite educates its children together, generation after generation, in one place.

An elite school risks becoming a closed circle, and Athens College has worked against that with a scholarship program funded by parents and alumni. It has long given students from across the social spectrum a way in, regardless of what their families could pay. The clearest expression of that spirit came in 1974. After the Turkish invasion of Cyprus sent thousands fleeing, the school took in forty-eight Greek Cypriot refugee children, enrolled them in its boarding department, and gave every one of them a full scholarship. In a school defined by privilege, it was a moment that chose generosity instead.

Today the institution, formally the Hellenic-American Educational Foundation, spans Athens College and its sister Psychico College, together teaching around three thousand students from kindergarten through to the International Baccalaureate, plus two thousand more in adult education. Its library is among the largest school libraries in Europe and was the first in Greece to put its entire catalog into a computer. The grounds hold football pitches, an indoor pool, tennis and basketball courts, a squash hall. It is a campus built to the scale of its ambitions, which were never modest, and which a century of graduates have spent running a country to fulfill.