The park was designed in 1934 with a clear and patriotic purpose - to honour the fighters of the Greek Revolution of 1821, the uprising that wrenched Greece free from the Ottoman Empire after centuries of rule. Twenty-one of those heroes stand here as marble busts among the trees. The original vision was grander still: planners imagined a 'Pantheon' for the revolutionaries and a great Christian temple dedicated to Greek independence, monuments that were never built. What was completed is memorial enough. To stroll the park is to walk a roll call of the men who imagined a Greek nation into being, set among fountains and Mediterranean planting that shifts colour with the seasons.

The park was an act of persistence against constant shortage. The ground had long been a gathering place for Athenians under King Otto, the country's first modern monarch, and in 1927 it was handed to a new commission charged with turning it into a green space to rival the National Garden. Money was the problem from the start. Work stalled, restarted in 1933 on the scraps of remaining funds, then stalled again amid administrative chaos before a special state fund finally took on the cost. Planting began in 1935 and pressed on through the Metaxas dictatorship until Greece entered the Second World War in 1940. In those five years, workers put 46,000 trees and bushes into the ground, deliberately choosing deciduous species so the park would offer shade in summer and let in the low sun of winter.

The park's monuments reach beyond 1821. An equestrian statue of King Constantine I has guarded the main entrance since 1938. Near Alexandras Avenue stands a quieter, more poignant memorial - a tribute to the British, Australian, and New Zealand soldiers who fought and died in the Battle of Greece during the Second World War, crowned by a statue of the goddess Athena. The planners took deliberate care that no central viewpoint in the park should lose its sightline to the Acropolis, though they failed to cap the height of the buildings rising around its edges. Inside the grounds, life carries on: two churches, a playground, the open-air Aliki theatre hosting concerts and plays, and Green Park, one of the city's most historic cafes.

By the new century the park had grown tired, and in April 2008 a radical renovation began - though many locals were openly dubious and voiced their opposition. Under the architect Alexandros Tombazis, the work was delivered in December 2010 at a cost of nearly ten million euros, drawn from European funds and national resources. The numbers tell the scale of the change: 1,200 trees, 50,000 flowers, 7,500 topiaries, and 2,500 roses replaced more than 22,000 square metres of old tarmac with grass and beds. New marble and granite paving was laid, and a vast hidden network of water, drainage, and electricity was buried beneath. Crucially, the renovation kept faith with the park's own history, treating its century of monuments and sculptures as the heart of the place rather than scenery to be swept aside.