The founders chose the name Cholargos to honor the ancient deme from which Pericles came, the great statesman and general of Athens's golden age. It is a proud lineage to claim. Yet philological and archaeological evidence, including inscriptions, places the original deme of Cholargos in a quite different part of Attica, west or northwest of the old city near modern Ilion or perhaps Kamatero, well away from this hillside below Mount Hymettus. The modern suburb, in other words, wears a borrowed crown. Rather than a flaw, it is a charming bit of honesty: a place that took a hero's address and then freely admitted the address didn't quite belong to it.

What this ground actually was in antiquity is no less ancient. The land of present-day Cholargos lay within the deme of Phlya, and the earth here has long memory. Archaeological finds at the foothills of Hymettus reach back to the Early Helladic period, with later evidence of life through Classical and Hellenistic times. Many burial monuments date to the fifth and fourth centuries BC, the very era of Pericles, and faint signs of habitation continue through the Roman and Byzantine centuries. Then, under Ottoman rule, the land fell deserted, an empty stretch of Attica waiting, as it turned out, for the twentieth century to fill it.

Modern Cholargos has a founder of its own, and he made sure no one would forget it. On March 1, 1926, a cooperative called the Agropoleon Company was formed to find land for building, led by a man named Panagiotis Voutsinas. The first house raised was his own, a two-storey mansion at the corner of Pericles Avenue and Evripidou Street, naming the new streets after the suburb's adopted classical patrons. In 1937 the community council renamed Evripidou Street in Voutsinas's own honor and set a marble plaque beside his door declaring him the founder of Cholargos. Detached from neighboring Chalandri as an autonomous community around 1930, Cholargos became a full municipality in 1963.

The suburb that exists today was shaped by hardship and then by a flood. During the wartime occupation, an Italian army unit established its headquarters here, and by Greece's liberation the area was in poor condition, its residents rebuilding through small trade. The real growth came in the 1960s, when Athenians migrating within their own city poured into Cholargos. The picturesque villas and elegant mansions of the old town gave way, as in so many Athens suburbs, to the standardized apartment blocks of mass housing. Its position helped: tucked against the base of Hymettus, Cholargos catches cool air sliding down the mountain and tends to run a degree or two cooler than the baking city center. Today it is the seat of the Papagou-Cholargos municipality and home to the Ministry of Infrastructure and Transport, a comfortable northern suburb that still carries, with a wink, the name of Athens's greatest citizen.