Κολιάτσου · district
Koliatsou Square 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 10,316 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.
Two squares on Patision, a kilometre apart, that were the social centre of north Athens in the 1950s and 60s — cafes, the Studio and Radio City cinemas, theatres, writers and students. Amerikis was named in 1927 for American philhellenism; Koliatsou was officially renamed Australias and nobody uses it. Both are now ordinary, tired, heavily multicultural squares surrounded by dense blocks, and they are among the very few pieces of open ground in the district.
Both squares are named in police operational planning as drug-dealing spots, and the streets off them are where sex work and dealing have been reported; the squares themselves are poorly lit and thinly used after dark.
Avoid booking on either square. Cheap flats and a direct trolleybus to the centre are not worth arriving at midnight into the one dark open space for blocks around.
Reputation against reality. Residents, not tourists, are the constituency here — they fought off a plan to turn the Kyprou-Patision green space into a car park and replanted it themselves. The squares are used all day by families and pensioners; the warning is about the hours and the specific side streets.
Streets and squares: Plateia Amerikis · Plateia Koliatsou · Patision (28is Oktovriou) · Acharnon · Fokionos Negri · Lelas Karagianni