Vrilissia is a suburban municipality of the North Athens regional unit, in the Attica region. It is located in the Athens basin, at the southwestern foot of the Penteli Mountain. At the 2011 census, the municipality had 30,741 residents.
History
In antiquity the area of Vrilissia formed part of the deme of Phlya, which covered the land spanning from Psychiko to Agia Paraskevi and mainly centered on what is now known as the Municipality of Chalandri.
Vrilissia was part of the municipality of Chalandri until 1949, when it became a separate community. It became a municipality in 1990. The suburb experienced rapid development during 2004 as a result of city improvements for the Athens Olympic Games, with the city’s peripheral road circuit completed, works of the city’s regeneration, widening of the central avenue and diverting of the inner traffic. After long-lasting conflicts, the Naval Base region was transferred to the municipality with an official ceremony, while many small parks were created in each neighbourhood.
Mayor of municipality since 2007 is Mr Kostas Ioannidis, while Mr Nikos Papadopoulos is granted with the title of Emeritus President of the Municipality as chairman of the Vrilissia Community for many years, assisting on local issues.
Features
Vrilissia is an affluent suburb with several schools spanning all grades, sporting grounds and parks; it is also home to a large commercial district with a number of banks and several malls within its territory. Two popular centres of activity are the two main squares, “Plateia Iroon” or Iroon Square and “Plateia Analipseos” or Analipseos Square, recently renovated and hosting several small coffee shops. Vrilissia has exceptionally wide, straight roads, in stark contrast to those typically found in Athens, and is also relatively green, with most houses/apartment blocks extending to gardens.Ano Vrilissia Maisonette Block
Vrilissia has a popular men’s handball team, competing in the A1 league.
Vrilissia suburban forest
The administrative limits of the city at around 1950–1970 reached up to the foothills of the Pentelikon Mountain. In particular, the residential part at the urban design of the suburb in the old days reached to the peripheral road of Penteli, Anapafseos’s Avenue. Over that avenue the woodland of Patima Hill (Footing Hill) spread, on which the Metamorphoseos tou Sotiros (Jesus Christ Savior’s Metamorphosis) church was set, as well as a small space with pits placed for the neighbouring marble workshops. This space was progressively shaped for the settlement of the Vrilissia Municipal Damari (Pit) Theatre of Aliki Vougiouklaki.
At that time, Penteli constituted a popular destination for day excursions for Athenians, as well as picnics, walks in the forest, a stop for a coffee, or dinner at the local taverns. Despite the natural wealth of the mountain, it was never characterised as a “National Forest”, as was the case with the neighbouring Parnitha Mountain, largely due to the landholding muniments of the Penteli Abbey since the 16th century, often sold or adopted by local mountaineer graziers working at the abbey’s farm-lands, before the constitution of the modern Greek state. When urban housing projects began reaching Halandri, Vrilissia and Melissia, Penteli started to transform into a residential landscape. Features that had long started to creep in, since the time of the monks, the Sarakatsaneoi graziers and the Doukissa of Plakentia who lived there since the 18th century. The gradual rise in value of the region, caused by the build-up of the area, triggered individual or association claims, while the available pieces of land at the main Vrilissia area were rapidly taken up.
When the Penteli town plan began to take form, the claims increased, both in volume and intensity. Courts began to vindicate individual and association claims with a legal base of “good fidelity”, and “usucaption”. Vrilissia kept expanding into the hill, while it saw losses from each of its sides from the neighbouring suburbs of Melissia, New and Old Penteli. Around this time and in stark contrast to the lower-density provisions afforded for the Ano Vrilissia settlement below the Anapafseos Avenue, the hill was allowed multi-floor apartment blocks (up to five levels), in the process compromising the aesthetics of the Penteliko scenery.
Finally, a pine-clad area of 0.088 km2 (0.034 sq mi) was preserved around the northern borders of the municipality, up to the neighbouring suburbs and reaching the Halandri gullies to the south, a natural protection of the city from the traffic and exhaust. The climate of Vrilissia has always been exceptional in a “cement city” as some parts of Athens are often characterized. Even today, with the important new transportation projects built, and the trading development, Vrilissia’s climate is still considered to be clean, offering ideal conditions of living to its residents. Nevertheless, during the last years many unfortunate incidents have threatened this particular feature of the region.
The recorded suggestions of the Greek state that the sub judice piece of land was characterized as forested since 1836 and that it constituted part of a wider region that came under its ownership by the Treaty of Konstantinoupoli on account of the “final distinction of the Greek borders” and by the 1830 protocols of London, as successor of the Turkish State, were not accepted by the court. On the contrary, the court decided that the Abbey from 1600 until 1955 owned in good faith those parts (among the rest) and became owner of this piece of public property on usucaption, since also public property may come under private ownership as long as this piece of property is used for 30 consecutive years in good faith, which was completed on 9/11 1915. However, it only until the July 2007 that the Appellate reached a verdict on the same case which vindicated the individual claims on the same argument and which did not even accept the procedural intervention of the Municipality at the Court. This particular verdict constitutes a critical decision for the irrevocable examination of the substance of the case because even attempting to exercise recantation would only affect jurisprudential matters of the case and not the substance of the verdict. In each case, however, the Greek state and the municipality are expected to examine any possible legal means left.