Forget about Christmas. In Greece, Easter is the main event, one where food, naturally, plays a starring role. It is also very much a holiday celebrated in the countryside: most Athenians go back to their villages during the holiday to be with their extended family and enjoy the Easter-related culinary delights of their home region.

Spata (pop. 10,000) lies just 20 km east of Athens and is probably best known as the location of Athens International Airport. But the town is more than just a gateway into and out of the region – especially at the end of June. That’s when Spata hosts a festival to honor St. Peter and St. Paul, the official protectors of the city. The highlight of the festival comes at the end of the last day, June 30, with a glorious communal meal: Enormous quantities of braised beef that have been cooked for 12 hours over a wood fire are served to all the citizens of Spata and visitors to the town.

The neighborhood of Metaxourgio in central Athens gets its name from the historic Athanasios Douroutis silk factory (metaxi means “silk”), which closed down in 1875. The former factory, which now houses the Municipal Art Gallery, was designed in 1833 by the Danish architect Hans Christian Hansen and is among the city's most important surviving neoclassical structures. The building was originally intended to be a shopping center, but because the area became an industrial zone, it inevitably attracted mostly working-class residents who were employed in the nearby factories, smaller industries or workshops.