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Born and raised Athenian here, oldest capital of Europe.

Downtown Athens and most of the suburbs are filled with ancient and byzantine ruins, despite the damage that wars, christians and muslims did.

I've watched plays in millennia old theaters. This is damn powerful.

Even in Athens I can imagine an ancient inhabitant being lost and confused amongst a grid of midrise concrete buildings. Then they'd turn a corner and catch a glimpse of the Acropolis...

London, sort of continuously inhabited since Roman times, wouldn't pass the test even if an ancient Roman inhabitant was standing on a street following the line of a Roman road and looking direct at the foundations of the London wall. Even the river course would be unfamiliar.

Slightly off topic, but playing Assassin's Creed Odyssey brought out an infatuation with Greece within me. I am truly envious of your Greek heritage and that you get to enjoy such a rich history, a relatively secular society, and gorgeous scenic areas. I am actually Persian and although we also have a rich history and scenic lands, I find Greece and Greek history far more appealing. Getting to explore many facets of ancient Greece in Assassin's Creed Odyssey has been an absolute treat.

EDIT: a word

Well heritage is a double edged sword. From one hand you do feel proud and blessed to live in a place so rich in history because it's everywhere around you. But in the same time it's kind of a burden that drags society in worshiping the past. A lot of fellow Greeks live on the premises that because our past was so glorious everyone else is dipshit and we shouldn't even bother finding our place in the modern world.

Well said! I would also like to add that history is also (in part) a construct of the times you live in. Greece post-1830 looks back at the ancient times while all but forgetting the centuries of Ottoman rule that also shaped the current culture (especially cuisine). Bulgaria, while having a similar history (the Thracians instead of the Greek and Macedonians, also Orthodox, also Ottoman) prefer to trace their mythical history back to the Bulgarians of the Volga rather than calling ancient Thracia the cradle of Western Civilization.

I'm from Italy and here we are taught a linear history shooting like a bullet from the Romans to Renaissance (mostly glossing over the Middle Ages), and that has important political consequences in what it means to identify as an Italian.

In other words one can say that history, as it is taught in school, is instrumental in constructing a national identity and as such it is wielded as a tool by the political and cultural élites.

>I'm from Italy and here we are taught a linear history shooting like a bullet from the Romans to Renaissance (mostly glossing over the Middle Ages), and that has important political consequences in what it means to identify as an Italian.

As a Frenchman I have always found Italians identifying so strongly to Romans a bit creepy. I've had very heated conversations with people who wouldn't balk from the notion that « they » had conquered Europe at a time « we » lived in trees (notwithstanding Gaul having cities upwards of 40k inhabitants). Italy hasn't been Roman for much longer than Spain or Gaul and the entire peninsula nearly had a civilization « hard reset » with the utter ravage of the Gothic wars and Justinian's plague.

Things might have been simpler if we had kept the medieval demonym and referred to Italians as « Lombards ».

And most French I know have this weird notion they somehow won WWII because the true French government was in London ;)

I am French and I don't think that at all, nor do I know anybody who thinks like that.

First of all there is a winky face in my message, it's interesting how a message in jest can trigger nationalistic sentiments (downvotes in this case).

In all seriousness though, the 8th of May is still celebrated with victory parades throughout the country.

You can't just deny France also has some trouble remembering their history. Think of how long Kubrick's Paths of Glory was banned...

First, I am not the one who downvoted you. My reply was more about giving an anecdote countering yours, than being a nationalist.

About France remembering its history, it's true that for a long time some things were hidden, but in 1995 (I think) the then President Jacques Chirac said that France should own the crimes commited by the Vichy government.

I am not saying that every bad deed done by France is not hidden somewhere, but some efforts were made by the French to reconcile with their history.

I didn't say you downvoted me and I'm sure you didn't, though a couple of people must have...

Thus said I'm not denying that in most places a decently educated person knows about the darker side of history of their country. My point is just that history as it is taught in high schools is a narrative that is (also) used to justify a sentiment of national pride.

Italy has ancient Rome and the Renaissance, Greece has ancient Greece, Ukraine has Kievan Rus', and just like those France has its own founding myths, be it Charlemagne, Napoleon, De Gaulle, or the Republican ideals...

Yep, you're right. We were taught tiny details of the rise of Rome, when it was a little village, and Julius Caesar was a hero. Then I grew up and realized that nowadays he would be a war criminal and at best one of those guys longing to be president for life. For sure the ancestors of the people living in today France were not happy to have his armies in their country back then.

Mmm. I’ve only seen one country that doesn’t collectively see its history with gold-tinted glasses — yet even here, there are people like my landlord, who has told me he didn’t understand why the DDR fell despite being a student in it.

Having conversations with people in South Africa, Ghana, and Rwanda about their country's history felt a lot like talking to Germans.

Lots of nuance.

Kinda depends who you talk to. For many americans, the slave trade and genocide of indigenous peoples are key, and embarrassing, chapters of our history. American children are taught very differently, largely according to the ruling party in their state.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/01/12/us/texas-vs-c...

Don't feel envy about such generalities. To give you an example, my hero and fellow Athenian, Socrates, was killed by his own people.

DNA doesn't matter. How you choose to live your life does.

Nitpick. Socrates was given a choice. His decision to kill himself was his own. I'd probably do the same. He was 70+ anyway. A lifetime of annoying dialectic tends to make lots of enemies quickly.

What was the choice? Wasn’t he sentenced to death?

They sentenced him to death to force him to leave the city. No one expected him to decide to die rather than leave.

I thought they literally sentenced him to death, and he had the opportunity to escape but refused to take it?

Yes! The point is that everyone, friends and enemies, wanted and expected him to take it.

You are right. My point was that there is nothing magical in Greek ancestry, but a mixture of great and stupid individuals, as in all societies.

I've always wondered how super old cities like Athens and Rome deal with infrastructure. I mean, if you need to install new sewer or cabling systems underground you're dealing with literally thousands of years of stuff under the city, and I'm guessing there is no good documentation for what's there. How do civil engineers know where it's safe to build?

They have to have archaeologists dig it all up first.

It's typical to see displays such as [1], even in the basements of cafeterias in Athens. This one is from the Syntagma metro station.

By the way, in settlements were people are living for thousands of years, they usually build on top of what there was already there.

[1] - https://cdn.theculturetrip.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/10...

That's a great example.

There is a museum near the Acropolis where they put a glass floor in and you can look down and see the ruins they've uncovered.

It's really remarkable. Buildings from the past were demolished and new buildings were built on top. It's interesting to look around and realize that you're walking over 30 ft worth of ruins everywhere.

Jericho might interest you then. It's an oasis city, with a very distinctive view of surrounding hills.

The most ancient structures are from 9kya, and the city existed in a lot of forms since that point. I believe the current city streets are from the Roman period, and probably date to the iron age or older.

What fascinates me about the site is the architectural similarity between the oldest city (the 9kya, neolithic city) and Çatalhöyük of the same period. These are the oldest known cities, and predate the oldest known "empires" by a lot.

This hints at a neolithic (and perhaps even ice age) cultural exchange over very large distances.

Jericho even had town walls complete with a tower at 9kya. Absolutely astonishing, because they were even pre-pottery.

According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jericho it looks like the city has moved around a bit (not a huge amount, but a few kilometers) over time. It looks like the modern city's location was finally decided in the 4th century AD. Also it seems to have been razed and rebuilt quite a few times. Given that many structures from the Byzantine period had to be excavated (as in they were buried beneath the ground), I suspect the current city streets are quite a bit younger than dating from the Romans.

Xi'an (on this list as one of the oldest cities) has a fully preserved (but often refurbished) city wall: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortifications_of_Xi%27an

It's complete so you can still walk the entire 4 sides of the wall in one hike, or rent a bike and circle the entire city in ~1 hour or so.

When you're atop the city wall, there's definitely a sense of being in two different times, both ancient and modern, at the same time as the modern Xi'an skyline makes up the background while you trek on stones that are hundreds (thousands?) of years old.

The current Xi'an walls were built in the 1370 during the Ming dynasty.

Quite a few of the cities of Ancient Greece and its colonies have survived to this day. Obviously Athens and many places in Greece but not only.

For example in France, Marseille and Nice (both Greek colonies) are 2,600 and 2,300 years old, respectively. The first inhabitants would definitely recognise them immediately today from the unique landscape (like Yerevan).

As for Puning, it's not so much related to China's recent changes but to the landscape. Mountains are unique and don't change much or at all in 2,000 years. But in a plain there is nothing to distinguish the landscape apart from buildings.

Mm, but it's not just the towering Mount Ararat and the river of Hrazdan that make Yerevan obviously Yerevan. The name of the city has remained extremely similar for about 2,000 years, the language, the writing...

Nice, in my opinion (I've only been there twice) has very little connection to the Nice of old. The geography is not very unique (travel the Mediterranean coast and I promise you you'll find plenty of places that look nearly identical.) It's cycled through plenty of languages and was even originally 2 different cities (Cemenelum and Nikaia.) Put an occupant of Cemenelum in modern day Nice and I doubt they would know it was the same place. The once large river Paillon is dried to a part of what it once was and covered up by concrete; the language is completely different (and has changed many times) - hell, Nice wasn't even part of France until the late 1800s!

In Marseille, sure, an ancient inhabitant would recognize it due to the islands if nothing else. But as much as I love Marseille (one of my favorite places in the world, actually) - I get much less of an "ancient" feeling there than anywhere in Armenia or Iran, for example.

>I get much less of an "ancient" feeling there than anywhere in Armenia or Iran, for example.

All the old town was blown up with dynamite within a few days during the 1940's...

Yeah, and it shows. Marseille feels more old fashioned, romantic, 1960s. If you take the TGV from Paris to Nice, Marseille is where you meet the beautiful Mediterranean and the train slows from 320km/h down to an average of 57 km/h.

Yerevan feels like 70% 1970s Soviet life, 20% ancient civilization, and 10% 2050 futurism. I'd love to find more places like it.

Language is constantly changing. No one alive 2000 years ago would be able to readily communicate in a modern vernacular, so I don't think that's a good standard on which to judge.

iirc modern Icelandic is somewhat mutually intelligible with old Norse, to the point where students can read 1200+ year old Viking writings with only a gloss, like we might read Shakespeare. Icelandic is unusual among languages for this though.

Persian (Farsi) is another example.

Part of that is due to the writing system - Icelandic has an unusually wide gap between spelling and actual pronunciation (as does English). The spellings often reflect older pronunciations, so it'd be easier for a modern Icelander to read the Eddas than to understand casual speech of their era.

(Again, similar things are true of English to a less extreme degree: The Canterbury Tales are a struggle to understand, but I can plod my way through them with the aid of heavy glossing. But I doubt if I could have a conversation with a time-traveling Geoffrey Chaucer.)

That's one reason why I chose Yerevan, actually! Old Armenian (1600 years old) and modern Armenian are fairly similar! Same writing system with only small changes, and modern Armenians (or at least the handful of random Armenians I've asked) can understand old Armenian. It takes a good bit of extra effort, but it's definitely possible.

Fascinating language (and alphabet) by the way.

> Marseille and Nice (both Greek colonies)

No shit?! I had no idea the greek empire(s) stretched up this far. Was it a peaceful colonisation?

The colonies were started by individual city states.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_colonisation

They were in constant conflict with the surrounding Gaulish tribes. In fact the invasions of Gaul (plural, Caesar only finished it) started by Marseille asking help from its Roman ally.

If I'm remembering my history:

Athens founded Phocacea (in modern day Turkey), which founded Marseille, which founded Nice. All were independent Republics.

My understanding is that it was peaceful, or mostly peaceful. The aim was settling a city to further trade, not military conquests. That came later with the Romans.

>The first inhabitants would definitely recognise them immediately today from the unique landscape (like Yerevan).

I doubt someone would recognize Marseille at first sight. If they looked hard enough they might recognize the harbour having vaguely the same shape and some mountains outside the city being the same.

I actually annotated a drawing of Roman-era Marseille with the names of modern features a few years back [1].

The natural features were massively overbuilt or even erased (like during the 19th c. to make way for avenues), which made things level off somewhat. The same goes for every city. Go to Rome someday. The famed hills are now invisible, expect for the Capitol (although it would look far less remarkable if the Forum hadn't been excavated).

[1] https://i.imgur.com/zsc0Zz1.jpg

The islands, hill next to the harbour, and hills around the city are quite unique and as visible now as they were then. The major change that has happened is that the trees are now all gone.

I'm thinking that the view looking to the south end of the city, with its striking hills, would be instantly recognised by any local from the Greek period.

I agree, though, that the harbour itself would most likely be unrecognisable, not only because of the extensive urbanisation but because the shape has been seriously remodelled.

With your criterion cities on mountainous regions have a bit of unfair advantage.

Another Armenian city https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Van,_Turkey, which is older than Yerevan, would match it too, but it's not included in the list on wikipedia. (Maybe because a large part of Van have been ruined and left uninhabited in ~1920s).

My favorite in this category is Damascus. What makes it special is that the old city is mentioned in the Bible, including the "street called Straight." That street still exists.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straight_Street

On a tangent: I love it when an article shows up on HN that is already greyed out, meaning I've seen it before.

Madurai in Tamil Nadu state, India, may be one, I think - partly. Area of lanes around the Meenakshi temple probably look somewhat like they must have n000+ years ago. Flower, idli, dosa, parotta, sari, clothes, etc. shops, knick knacks, man-powered rickshaws, tame temple elephants blessing humans with trunks, etc.

Well, Belgrade is not nearly that old as Yerevan, although in its broader area were some of the oldest settlements in Europe, more than 7000 years old. However todays Belgrade fortress (called Kalemegdan) sits on the very same place where Celts built their fortification around 300 BC. In 2nd century BC Romans turned it into their city called Singidunum. Most of the today's fortress walls are from the medieval and later times, but some parts of the Roman walls are still visible today, and the big Roman well that was used to supply the city with water still exists and it's open to tourists. Unfortunately most of the roman structures outside the fortress are nowadays under the modern city of Belgrade, but the position and the layout of the fortress didn't change much. Danube and Sava rivers still run under it and the hill looks the same, so I presume that some ancient tourists wouldn't have hard time to recognize it immediately.

Trier on that list still has a lot of Roman architecture standing around, a time-traveling Roman would have no problem finding their way.

One of the city gates still stands, the throne hall of Roman Emperor Constantine (Basilica), the Amphitheater ruins, the large Roman baths (ruins), even the large Dome is built on top a structure Emperor Constantine built.

Rome, Jerusalem, Athens, maybe Istanbul.

Giza?

It's a funny table. A mix of historic record (indicating eg most of the Greek cities) Vs archeological evidence of some kind of habitation Vs some myth/oral history. Overall very arbitrary what is and is not considered a city or at starting point.

> Anyone know more of these cities, where it'd be obvious to the ancient inhabitants that it was the same city?

According to your definition if there are recognizable major natural landmarks ( "Mount Ararat", "river Hrazdan" ), then it means nothing has changed since people in the past would recognize it and be able to place themselves. So using your logic, any city near a major mountain, river, etc would be recognizable. So tokyo ( visible from Mt Fuji ) hasn't changed, manhattan hasn't changed ( hudson/east rivers ), seattle hasn't changed ( Mt Rainier ), etc.

Mt. Rainier is only visible from Seattle on exceptionally clear days.

I'd say it's visible from Seattle on any clear day, it's just clear days are exceptional (outside of summers).

It's out most of the summer.

Acoma is still very much like that. They now have a road so you don't have to hike up the mountain to get to it, but not much else has changed in 2000 years. It's a wonderful place to visit any time but especially on Christmas Eve. [0]

Santa Fe also nearby and on the list but it's quite a bit more modern. Still it's the oldest capital city in the continental US.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acoma_Pueblo

Yeah, Georgia has way better artifacts than Armenia, for example: Vani, Mtskheta, Kutaisi, etc. For some reason Poti is missing from the list too.

Way better? I spent a week in both Georgia and Armenia recently and although I think the two counties are some of the coolest places I've been I found Armenia to be more interesting. That may have been because I had a local guide in Armenia though. (I like to travel with Couchsurfing as you get to meet and stay with locals, and for whatever reason Georgia is the only country I've visited where I couldn't find a host.)

In particular, I spent a day in Kutaisi and although it was a lovely little place I didn't find it super interesting.

I'll definitely be back though, I hadn't heard of Mtskheta and it seems really interesting, I'd like to check it out.

I assume you're Georgian, from the name :) Any other places you'd suggest to visit in Georgia? I personally prefer the really unusual/out of the way stuff myself.

I would recommend Vardzia (Cave city), Mestia for Svan towers and obviously Tbilisi sulfur baths, as for Kutaisi, go to Sataplia Nature Reserve.

Rome?