For most of its life the company was an arm of the Greek state, known for years as the Public Petroleum Corporation, or DEP. In 1998 a corporate reorganization rechristened it Hellenic Petroleum, and a long, gradual privatization began. The shape of its ownership tells the story of modern Greece in miniature: the government still holds a large stake, a slice trades publicly on the Athens Stock Exchange, and a substantial share belongs to a holding company of the Latsis family, one of the country's great shipping and business dynasties. It is part public, part private, part family fortune, a hybrid that mirrors a national economy caught between old structures and new markets.

The scale is hard to overstate. The company operates three refineries, at Aspropyrgos, Elefsina, and Thessaloniki, which together account for well over half of Greece's entire refining capacity. Its fuel flows out through more than 2,000 gas stations across Greece and neighboring Balkan states including Serbia, Bulgaria, and Cyprus. But it does far more than refine crude. It is the most important petrochemicals producer in Greece, turning oil into plastics, PVC, and polypropylene, the raw stuff of everyday objects. It runs a natural-gas power station near Thessaloniki, holds a stake in the national gas company, and has chased exploration rights off the western Greek coast. To trace its products is to trace the material life of an entire nation.

Energy is never only about engineering; it is about where the oil comes from and what buying it means. After Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, that question landed squarely on Greek refiners. The company had long sourced crude from a mix of suppliers, including Russia, and Russian oil still made up a meaningful share of its intake. A widely cited Yale School of Management review of corporate responses placed the firm in a middle category, neither a clean exit nor a defiant stay, holding off new investment while continuing to do business. The position drew criticism, because every barrel purchased helped fund a war that has cost civilian lives. It is a reminder that the towers at Aspropyrgos are tied, through long pipelines and longer supply chains, to decisions made and suffering felt far from the Greek coast.

Aspropyrgos itself is a place most visitors to Athens never see, even as they pass it. It lies on the Thriasian Plain, the same stretch of land that in antiquity hosted the sacred procession to Eleusis, where Greeks once walked to celebrate the mysteries of Demeter. Now the plain hums with tank farms, cracking towers, and the steady orange glow of flares against the night. There is a strange continuity in it. For thousands of years this western approach to Athens has been a place of passage and supply, the road by which the city was fed. The fuel still comes this way. Only the cargo has changed, from grain and salt to crude oil and the plastics that shape modern Greek life.