Route 3: Kato Kalamaki and the coastal avenue

Church of the Transfiguration of the Saviour

The first church was built in 1905 on the spot where the Church of the Transfiguration of the Saviour stands today.

Tsouchlos villa

Dimitrios Tsouchlos, who at the time ran the largest fashion house in Athens, built another tower-like house that was initially used as a card club and later rented out to various personalities, such as Angelos Sikelianos and his wife Eva. In 1933, when the couple separated, they gave up the lease. During the Occupation the Germans requisitioned it and used it as a bar, and in that period the house suffered serious damage. Live ammunition was later found in the garden. In 1948 it was bought by Georgios Stamopoulos, who had to carry out many repairs before it could be lived in again in the early 1950s. The tower still stands and is an ornament of Alimos.

Agios Kosmas

The peninsula of Agios Kosmas was already inhabited in the Bronze Age (Early Helladic period) and later in the Mycenaean period. The settlement extended along the southern shore of the peninsula and had cemeteries in its two coves. The first inhabitants must have settled in the area around 2,300 BC and came from the Cyclades, as the finds show. As regards the classical period, very few finds have so far been uncovered on the surface of the headland.

Chapel of Agios Kosmas

It is the latest Byzantine monument in the area: a small, single-space, barrel-vaulted church to which a domed compartment has been added; it may well have been built on the ruins of an ancient sanctuary. On the walls and vaults of the monument, wall paintings of the 17^th and 19^th centuries survive, painted over earlier layers of wall paintings.

Alimos baths

In 2003 a Mycenaean chamber tomb was uncovered which appears to have belonged to a larger burial complex associated with the settlement of Agios Kosmas. In this tomb, which had been partly destroyed by the German gun emplacement built over it later, several vessels were found, together with an interesting group of figurines, jewellery and two engraved seals.

Allied war cemetery

This is the cemetery of all the Commonwealth soldiers who fell in the Second World War, whose remains were brought here from the battlefields, from temporary military cemeteries and from ordinary cemeteries all over Greece. The cemetery memorial, the Athens Memorial, commemorates some 2,882 soldiers whose bodies were never found, from the operations in Greece and Crete in 1941 and in the period 1944-1945, from the Dodecanese and from Yugoslavia between 1943 and 1945. Part of the cemetery is the cremation memorial, which commemorates 74 Indian soldiers who were cremated. On the north-eastern side of the cemetery there is a section with the graves of soldiers and civilians who died in Greece after being wounded in the Crimean War.