Three buildings stand shoulder to shoulder along the northern side of the street, and together they are known as the Athenian Trilogy. In the centre is the University of Athens, designed by the Danish architect Christian Hansen and begun in 1839. Flanking it are two works by his younger brother, Theophil: the Academy of Athens, completed in 1885, and the National Library, begun in 1888 and finished under the German architect Ernst Ziller. The brothers came from Copenhagen carrying the era's conviction that the new Greek state should look like the old one. The Academy's painted statues and gilded detail were a deliberate reconstruction of how the ancients were believed to have coloured their temples - not the bleached white marble of romantic imagination, but something far more vivid.

The street's official name is Eleftherios Venizelos Avenue, bestowed in 1945 in honour of the statesman who shaped modern Greece more than any other politician of his age. Almost nobody calls it that. To Athenians it remains Panepistimiou - simply 'University Street' - named for the central building of the Trilogy at its upper corner. The gap between the official name and the spoken one is its own small lesson in how this city works: paperwork in one direction, habit in the other. Beyond the Trilogy, the boulevard gathers the institutions of a capital. The Bank of Greece, the Numismatic Museum, the Catholic Cathedral, and part of the grand old Hotel Grande Bretagne all line its course.

The street you see today is taller and harder than the one your great-grandparents would have known. Into the 1950s, low neoclassical houses of two or three storeys ran much of its length, their pediments and shutters a softer echo of the Trilogy's grandeur. Then came the building boom that followed the Greek Civil War. Over several decades a construction spree replaced almost all of them with blocks rising ten to fifteen storeys, and a handful of survivors now stand marooned among the concrete. The lost mansions were not the only casualties of modernity. When the Metro tunnelled beneath the avenue between 1997 and 2001, the removal of soil opened a void twenty-two metres down and the street itself sank by some four metres before workers filled the hole with concrete and let the traffic return.

For years the city debated whether to silence Panepistimiou altogether. A plan called Rethink Athens, backed by the Onassis Foundation, proposed turning the traffic-choked boulevard into a pedestrian and tram corridor - a calmer, more cosmopolitan promenade beneath the Trilogy's columns. Critics pushed back hard. A wide, straight street, they argued, is a place people pass through on purpose, not a square where life naturally pools; strip away the cars and the offices and the retail, and you risk a handsome dead zone serving little but cafes. The debate captures the deeper tension running the whole length of the street - between preserving a stage set of the past and keeping it a working artery of a living capital.