Sophie de Marbois-Lebrun was born in Philadelphia in 1785, the daughter of a French statesman who served in the new United States. She married into Napoleon's empire and became Duchess of Plaisance, a title from the Italian city of Piacenza. But her heart turned to Greece. A passionate philhellene, she helped fund the Greek War of Independence and, once the modern Greek state was born, looked after the education of the daughters of fallen revolutionary fighters. In 1834 she settled in the new capital and bought vast tracts of farmland around Athens, especially toward Mount Pentelikon. The station's name preserves the memory of a foreign-born woman who chose Greece, and whose land once spread across the hills this line now climbs toward.

The station almost got the wrong name. Through most of the construction of Metro Line 3, this stop was called "Stavros," and a different station up the line carried the name Doukissis Plakentias. The two were swapped late in the project. Planners reasoned that the other station sat nearer the true center of the suburb of Chalandri, while this one stands on the border of three municipalities, right on the route toward the duchess's old lands and her tower in Penteli. So the names traded places. The duchess's title moved to the junction that actually points toward her hills, a small act of geographic honesty buried in a transit authority's paperwork.

This was a station built against a clock. The metro platforms opened on 28 July 2004, and the suburban railway platforms two days later, on 30 July, just as Athens prepared to host the Summer Olympic Games. The whole project was part of the rush to modernize Greek transport before the world arrived. The first section of the Athens Airport line opened alongside it, finally stitching the new airport at Spata into the city's rail network. For a country that had waited generations to host the Games again, these gleaming platforms were a statement of arrival, finished only days before the Olympic flame was lit.

Doukissis Plakentias is also a quiet feat of engineering. It is where two different railways shake hands. Most trains on metro Line 3 terminate here, but some keep going, all the way to the airport, by switching onto the suburban railway in a dual tunnel just past the station. The catch is that the two networks run on entirely different power: the metro draws 750 volts of direct current from a third rail, while the suburban line uses 25,000-volt alternating current from overhead wires. In the stretch beyond the platforms, the trains physically change electrical systems mid-journey. Above ground, the suburban platforms sit in an unlikely spot, the median strip of the Attiki Odos motorway, trains gliding between lanes of traffic. It is a fittingly modern monument to a duchess who once owned the open country here.