Athens had mosques once. The Ottoman-era Tzistarakis and Fethiye mosques still stand in the old city, but they became archaeological monuments long ago and have not been used for worship since the 1920s. As the city's Muslim population grew through immigration in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, the absence of a formal place of worship became increasingly hard to sustain. With no official mosque, many of the city's Muslims prayed in informal prayer rooms - in basements, garages, and converted apartments scattered across Athens. The gap between the size of the community and the spaces available to it widened with every passing year.

The idea was old. The Greek Parliament first passed a law about building a mosque in the Athens area back in 1890. In 1970, Arab states offered to fund one, but nothing came of it. A more concrete attempt followed a law in 2000, which proposed a Saudi-financed mosque outside the city - a plan that stalled amid opposition from the Orthodox Church and local residents. The project that finally succeeded was a different kind of effort: financed entirely by the Greek state, making the Votanikos Mosque the only mosque in a European capital built solely with government funds. The path was not smooth. Construction was opposed by the Greek Orthodox Church and met with civil and judicial challenges, and four successive public tenders drew no bidders before a fifth, in 2016, was awarded to a consortium of major Greek construction firms.

The site was a former naval garage at Votanikos, a 1.7-hectare plot handed over by the Hellenic Navy. Before construction could begin, police had to clear the location of protesters who had occupied it. The finished building is modest and deliberately plain - around 1,000 square meters, with a prayer hall for 500 men and a separate space for 50 women, a fountain, and a courtyard, but no minaret. When it opened in 2020, after roughly fourteen years of design, dispute, and construction, the moment arrived under strange circumstances: the COVID-19 pandemic meant the long-awaited mosque opened to a city under restrictions, its first congregations small and masked. For the worshippers who had waited generations, it was, as one of them put it, a dream come true. Its first imam, Zaki Mohammed, leads prayers there still.