Ellinikon’s Long Landing: The Quiet History

On a hazy weekday morning on the Athens Riviera, the old airport is almost unrecognizable. The runways are still slightly noticeable from above, two pale scars running parallel to the sea, but at ground level, cranes, pylons, and incomplete concrete frames dominate the horizon. Security fences block off much of the site. Billboards promise “a new green, smart city” where families cycle past glass towers and a vast park rolls down to the water.

Photo: Olympic Airways Boeing 747-200 SX-OAB, retired in 1999. November 2025. © Leon Dimitrios/Corella Publishing

Welcome to Ellinikon – or rather, The Ellinikon, as the branding now insists. For more than 60 years, this was Athens’ main international airport, handling up to 13.5 million passengers a year before it closed in 2001. A few years later, its grounds hosted Olympic baseball and hockey, and then – in one of the most jarring turns in its history – a makeshift refugee camp. Today, it is marketed as Europe’s largest urban regeneration project, a €7–8 billion bet on luxury real estate and a coastal lifestyle.

How one piece of land could absorb so many roles, in so little time, says a lot about modern Greece – and about the kind of future European cities are building.

From glamour gateway to Olympic stage

Ellinikon opened in 1938 and, for decades, was Greece’s front door to the world. The airport became synonymous with Olympic Airways, Aristotle Onassis’s national carrier, and with the promise of jet-age modernity. Part of the site also hosted a US air base during the Cold War, underscoring its strategic importance.

By the 1980s and 1990s, however, Ellinikon was bursting at the seams. Squeezed between the sea and fast-growing southern suburbs, the airport was handling more passengers than its official capacity, while nearby residents complained about noise and traffic. A decision was made to build a new hub at Spata, 20 kilometres east. When Athens International Airport “Eleftherios Venizelos” opened on 28 March 2001, Ellinikon ceased commercial operations.

Photo: Olympic Airlines fleet parked at the former Ellinikon Airport during its heydays, Athens, October 1985. © Leon Dimitrios/Corella Publishing

The last Olympic Airways Boeing 737 departed for Thessaloniki; the lights went off in the terminals. Early on, politicians floated grand ideas for what would follow: above all, a huge metropolitan park that would give congested Athens the green lungs it never had.

Instead, in the early 2000s, the site was pressed back into service for another spectacle: the 2004 Olympic Games. Runways and apron areas were repurposed into the Hellinikon Olympic Complex, hosting sports such as baseball, softball, hockey, and fencing. For a few weeks, Ellinikon was again at the centre of global attention, symbolising a confident, modernised Greece.

Then the flame went out.

Ruins and refuge

In the years after the Olympics, Ellinikon slipped into limbo. The grand metropolitan park never materialised; instead, the former terminals and venues decayed behind fences, their seats bleaching in the sun and their walls filling with graffiti. Occasional trade fairs, concerts, and sports events could not disguise the sense of abandonment.

When Greece’s debt crisis hit, the 6-million-square-metre plot functioned as both a symbol of waste and a tempting asset. Successive governments tried to privatise it as a condition of the bailout, while local municipalities and citizen groups argued for a largely public park. Planning disputes, court challenges, and political hesitation dragged on for years.

Then, in 2015, the site took on a very different role. As wars in Syria, Afghanistan, and elsewhere pushed hundreds of thousands of people towards Europe, Greece found itself on the front line of the refugee crisis. With existing facilities overwhelmed, authorities used parts of the former airport terminal and Olympic venues at Hellinikon to house asylum seekers.

Photo: Refugee children from Afghanistan at play near the West Terminal building, Summer 2016. © Leon Dimitrios/Corella Publishing

The camp hosted up to 3,000 people, with estimates reaching 6,000 at its peak, many of them families, mostly from Afghanistan. Tents were pitched on former baseball fields and inside the old arrivals hall, scattered around on the parking lots and entrance facilities. Human rights organisations repeatedly criticised conditions as “deplorable” – overcrowded, poorly heated, with limited sanitation and no privacy.

In June 2017, police cleared the camp, busing the remaining residents to other sites across the country. Within a few days, the makeshift shelters were gone, leaving just rubbish, damaged fittings, and contested memories. For those who had once passed through Ellinikon as tourists or workers, the sight of people stranded there in tents was an unpleasant reminder of how uneven the freedom to move can be.

Europe’s “largest urban-regeneration project”

The next act in Ellinikon’s story is now rising quickly from the rubble.

Following a lengthy tender process, the site was leased to Lamda Development, a Greek company backed by international investors, which is spearheading a vast mixed-use scheme branded “The Ellinikon”. The project’s own materials describe it as “Europe’s largest urban-regeneration endeavour” and “a smart and sustainable new city within Athens.”

On roughly 6.2 million square metres of land, the developers plan luxury residences, office districts, hotels, marinas, Greece’s largest shopping mall, a Hard Rock hotel and casino resort, and the Riviera Tower. This 200-metre residential high-rise is set to become the country’s tallest building.

A central promise is the creation of a vast coastal park, around 2 million square metres in size, with restored streams, sports areas, and restored dunes – marketed as doubling Athens’ accessible green space.

Construction is well underway. Recent progress updates show major groundwork, soil and groundwater remediation (billed as the largest such project in Greece), and early structural work on key buildings and infrastructure.

Much of the old Olympic infrastructure has already been demolished. Some heritage elements, including parts of Eero Saarinen’s 1960s East Terminal, are meant to be preserved and adapted into cultural spaces.

Economically, the stakes are high. The total investment is estimated at around €8–10 billion over the coming decades. The government touts The Ellinikon as a flagship of the post-crisis recovery, capable of creating tens of thousands of jobs and attracting tourists and investors year-round.

Whose future city?

The Ellinikon’s official narrative leans heavily on expressions like “sustainability”, “innovation,” and “public space”. Plans promise bicycle lanes, electric-vehicle infrastructure, energy-efficient buildings, and, crucially, public access to parts of the seafront and the metropolitan park.

Yet the project also speaks to a wider European tension. Large regeneration schemes often arise on former industrial or infrastructural land, sold as chances to heal urban scars.

In a few years’ time, visitors may arrive at The Ellinikon, stroll through the park, shop at the mall, and watch the sunset from the marina without realising what stood here before. For the developers and politicians, that will be a sign of success: an “empty” site transformed into a glossy new city-within-a-city — for many others, it may feel more like a beautifully managed act of forgetting.