The beautiful and picturesque Anafiotika in Plaka has a special history as the whitewashed neighborhood that looks like a Cycladic island was once called “Black Stones”

During the period of Ottoman rule in the city of Athens, there lived slaves who some say were from Egypt and others that they were Ethiopians who lived in caves.

The high class of the Ottomans had them as servants and the old Athenians called them “Arapades”.

The reference made by Hans Christian Andersen in his Travels in Greece about this neighborhood of the African inhabitants of old Athens is also characteristic.

Then, because of the color of the people who lived in the area, the district was called “Black Stones”.

The name changed later, when in 1830 Athens became the capital of the newly formed Greek state and the people of Anafi arrived in the area – craftsmen trained to build their own stone houses on the rocks of their island.

Some of these builders decided they really liked Athens and eventually wanted to stay. However, they could not find and in fact could not afford to buy legal plots of land.

So they resorted to the solution of plots outside the plan and in fact next to the Acropolis.

Somehow, in 1860, two workers built the first houses in today’s area, which is Anafiotika.

The story, in fact, says that the two craftsmen, who came from Anafi, built during the night to go unnoticed by the authorities. Due to the political and social unrest of that period, the masons, who worked very quickly, were not noticed until they had completed their work.