Even the name is a small mystery. Some scholars trace 'Kamatero' to the prominent Byzantine Kamateros family - yet no one can point to which member it might honor, and the theory hangs there, unfinished. The toponym appears elsewhere too: a Kamateri on Rhodes, a Kamatero on Salamis noted for its infertile ground, which may say something about expectations for the place. The deeper past is thinner still. The oldest finds date to the 4th century BC, and an ancient wall on the ridge of Mount Aigaleos above the settlement may belong to the same era, when this land lay under the authority of Athens. The classical sources suggest the ancient deme of Eupyridae once stood somewhere near. Mostly, though, Kamatero kept no records of itself.

Kamatero enters history through a defeat. On the night of 27 January 1827, during the Greek War of Independence, Colonel Denis Bourbaki - a French cavalry officer fighting for the Greek cause - led his men onto the open plain here, expecting his fellow commanders to charge alongside him. They did not. Vasos Mavrovouniotis and the others held back or fled, and Bourbaki was left exposed against the Ottoman forces of Resid Mehmed Pasha. The battle was lost, and Bourbaki was captured and beheaded days later. It was the only engagement of his short war. The defeat was no small thing: it weakened the Greek effort to relieve the Acropolis of Athens, then under Ottoman siege, and helped seal that siege's grim outcome. A village that produced grain and wine had become, for one terrible night, a graveyard of Greek hopes.

For most of the 19th century Kamatero stayed small and slow. The population crept upward - 103 souls in 1846, 246 by 1889, 264 by 1896 - and it remained, in every account, a modest agricultural settlement. The real change came suddenly in the 1950s, when a great influx of mostly low-income families arrived and urbanization swept the old fields away. Two-thirds of the land is now residential, the houses mostly low, two storeys at the most. This was never a suburb of villas and summer estates like the wealthy northern districts; it grew up working-class and stayed that way. Today around 29,000 people live here, and the schools tell the story of that density: eight elementary schools, several secondaries, a vocational school, feeding graduates into the universities and colleges of Athens.

On 7 September 1999 the ground itself reminded Kamatero where it sat. A magnitude 6.0 earthquake struck just to the west of Athens, and Kamatero lay very near the epicenter. Houses cracked and crumbled; hundreds of residents were left without homes. By luck and the timing of the quake, no one in Kamatero was killed - but the damage was heavy, and the disaster underscored how exposed this quietly growing suburb had become as it spread across the seismic fault lines of western Attica. The same hills that had once made the land cheap and farmable now trembled under dense rows of postwar apartment blocks.

For all its concrete, Kamatero still touches wild ground. To the west rises Poikilo mountain, part of the Aigaleo range - a rocky, pine-dotted limestone slope that holds the last patches of forest and most of the suburb's open space. To the southeast lies the Antonis Tritsis Metropolitan Park, sprawling across more than 120 hectares of water courses, reed beds, evergreens, and farmland. Described as one of the last true wildlife reserves left in the Athens urban environment, it draws birds and animals through every season. Between the mountain and the marsh, the working families of Kamatero keep a foothold in the green - the faint remainder of the grain-and-wine country this place used to be.