Άγιος Νικόλαος · district
Agios Nikolaos scores 18 out of 100 for violent crime — high crime, on a scale where 50 is the average for Greece. It is home to about 10,477 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 district built around the church and square of Agios Nikolaos, with Acharnon as its commercial spine and its own ISAP station on Line 1. It was middle-class, then older residents left and migrant households moved in, drawn by cheap older flats and the transport. It functions as a working local high street: bakeries, phone shops, ethnic groceries, the Saturday market. Very few outsiders come here on purpose.
The square and the Acharnon shops thin out after closing and the area is named in the current police plan as a drug-trafficking focus, so the late-night picture on and around the square is the district's real problem.
Not a place to book. Line 1 puts you at Omonia quickly and the flats are cheap, but you would be staying in a police priority sector with nothing for a visitor in exchange.
Reputation against reality. Note the name clash: there is also a Plateia Agiou Nikolaou in the separate Municipality of Acharnes, well north of the city, which appears in unrelated police reports. The square in the Athens petty-crime plan is this one, off Acharnon street.
Streets and squares: Acharnon · Plateia Agiou Nikolaou · Leoforos Ionias · Agiou Nikolaou church