Άγιος Παντελεήμονας · district
Agios Panteleimonas scores 9 out of 100 for overall safety — high crime, on a scale where 50 is the average for Greece. It is home to about 15,013 people at 16,579 people per km².
The score is absolute, not a ranking: 50 is the offence rate for Greece as a whole, 100 the safest end of the scale and 0 the least safe, and every doubling of the rate costs the same number of points wherever you are. Regional units are scored from Eurostat's police-recorded offence rates per 100,000 inhabitants. Greece publishes nothing finer, so municipalities and districts share out their region's measured rate by how built-up they are and by documented local reporting — treat those two levels as an estimate, not a count of reported crime.
A dense 1960s apartment district around the big church on Acharnon, minutes from Victoria and Attiki metro. Middle-class once, emptied from the 1980s, and since the 1990s one of the most migrant neighbourhoods in Athens; the church runs a daily soup kitchen and the square has working cafes and a playground. It also names the police division covering Victoria, Attiki, Agios Nikolaos and Amerikis, so it absorbs their statistics as well as its own.
The square and Acharnon stay busy until shops close, then thin quickly; small-scale dealing, drinking groups and the odd teenage confrontation move onto the benches and the darker side streets.
Do not book here. Rates are low and the metro is close, but there is nothing for a visitor and the late walk in from Victoria or Attiki is precisely the walk the police operations plan is written about.
Reputation against reality. The 2008-2012 image — a square blockaded by a self-appointed 'residents' committee' fronting Golden Dawn, a padlocked playground — is out of date. The playground and square cafes have worked normally since municipal works around 2018, and local shopkeepers argue the name now carries crime that happens in neighbouring Victoria and Agios Nikolaos. The present problem is ordinary street crime, not organised racist patrols.
Streets and squares: Acharnon · Agiou Meletiou · Lelas Karagianni · Plateia Agiou Panteleimona · Neofytou Metaxa