Plaka grew up around the ruins of the ancient Agora, and history here is not a single era but a stack of them. The neighborhood holds monuments from every chapter of the city's long life, and a few of its streets, such as Adrianou and Tripodon, follow lines laid down in antiquity. Walk them and you trace routes that classical Athenians once walked. The district has been excavated almost continuously since the nineteenth century, and the digging often began by accident. A fire in 1884 burned away part of the neighborhood and, in clearing the ruins, gave archaeologists their chance to uncover the Roman Agora and Hadrian's Library, which had lain hidden beneath the houses.

Even the neighborhood's name is a small mystery. The toponym Plaka first appears in records only in the second half of the seventeenth century, and at first it referred merely to the area around the Choragic Monument of Lysicrates, which locals knew as the "lantern of Demosthenes." One theory traces the word to the Arvanitika phrase Pliak Athena, meaning "Old Athens," from an Albanian root for "old." Another holds that it comes from a plaque, plaka in Greek, that once marked a central intersection. The linguist Charalampos Symeonides favors the second view, noting that Plaka is a common Greek place name found across the country, attested as far back as 1089 and often denoting a spot marked by ancient slabs or marbles.

Plaka's people have always been a mixture. For centuries it was home to a sizable Albanian community, so much so that it served as the Albanian quarter of Athens into the late nineteenth century, and it sheltered the aristocratic Benizelos family, from whom Saint Philothei descended. Its most charming corner tells a different migration story. During the reign of King Otto in the nineteenth century, settlers from the small Aegean island of Anafi built the quarter of Anafiotika, carrying their home with them in stone. Its whitewashed cube houses, blue shutters, and tumbling flowers are pure Cycladic island architecture, transplanted improbably onto the slope of the Acropolis. Climbing into Anafiotika, you could be forgiven for forgetting you are in a capital city at all.

Plaka has endured upheaval and near-ruin. Like the rest of Athens, it was abandoned during the brutal fighting of the Greek War of Independence in 1826, then repopulated under King Otto by a mix of old Athenian families and newcomers. The neighborhood took its present shape across the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, only to decline from the 1950s through the 1970s under the pressures of postwar construction, cars, and mass tourism. A comprehensive preservation plan in the 1980s reversed the slide. Today Plaka is one of the most carefully protected districts in Greece, and uniquely in Athens, every utility, from water and power to internet and sewage, runs underground through custom-built, fully accessible tunnels, keeping the old streets free of clutter so the Neighborhood of the Gods can keep its timeless face.