Zografou climbs the western foothills of Mount Hymettus, just four kilometres east of central Athens, and the terrain shapes everything. Some streets pitch sharply uphill, a common sight in a suburb laid out across a mountainside. Eastward the built-up grid gives way to the forested slopes of Hymettus; westward it merges seamlessly into the city of Athens itself, with no clear seam between them. Hemmed in and landlocked across roughly eight and a half square kilometres, the suburb grew the only direction it could - upward, with apartment blocks rising as high as ten stories. Among its quarters is Ano Ilisia, which takes its name from the river Ilisos, whose source lies at St Eleousa, now within a university campus.

Zografou is, above all, a university town. The sprawling campus of the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens occupies its eastern quarter, and the National Technical University of Athens campus sits here too - two of the largest and most prestigious institutions in Greece, side by side. The result is a population threaded through with students, faculty, and staff, giving the suburb a youthful, transient energy that sets it apart from quieter residential districts. The constant churn of academic life - term-time crowds, cheap tavernas, the rhythm of exams and graduations - is woven into the character of the place. For tens of thousands of young Greeks, Zografou is simply where university happens.

The suburb's modern history starts after the Ottomans withdrew from the area in the 1830s, when the land passed to Ioannis Koniaris, a mayor of Athens, and to Leonidas Vournazos. It was Vournazos's widow, Eleni, who in 1902 sold a large tract of the Goudi area to Ioannis Zografos and set the installment plan in motion. As the first homes multiplied, the foundations of the Church of St Therapon - now the suburb's main church - were laid. In 1929 the growing settlement split from the municipality of Athens to become an independent community, and in 1947 it was elevated to a full municipality, its first president fittingly being Sotirios Zografos, son of the man who had sold the land plot by plot.

For a dense modern suburb, Zografou keeps a few quiet cultural treasures. The Gounaropoulos Museum, founded in 1979, is devoted to the dreamlike work of the painter Giorgios Gounaropoulos. Nearby, the Marika Kotopouli Museum occupies the 1926 villa of the celebrated actress of the same name - one of the great figures of the Greek stage, who lived from 1887 to 1954 - and now houses modern art. The suburb has been home to other notable figures as well, among them the actor Nikos Kourkoulos and the historian Dimitri Kitsikis, a member of the Royal Society of Canada. Local sport runs deep too, with football and basketball clubs and the Ilisiakos athletic club, founded back in 1927, rooted in the shared district of Ilisia.

For all its size, Zografou has long been hard to reach by rail - a notable gap for a suburb of around 70,000 people pressed right against the city. That is changing. Three new metro stations are planned for the suburb as part of Athens Metro Line 4, at Ilissia, at Zografou itself near Gardenia Place, and at Goudi, finally knitting this hillside district into the metro network. Construction has faced delays - the original 2029 target has slipped, with completion now expected in the early 2030s. For now, life runs on a thick web of bus lines and the Hymettus Ring Road skirting its edge. The climate is classic Athenian - hot, dry summers and mild winters - and the mountain forest at the suburb's back offers an escape from the density below. A town that began as affordable plots on a slope is still climbing, in more ways than one.