Some hotels carry an important historical weight. One of them is the Grande Bretagne Hotel, located at Athens Syntagma Square. The story begins in the mid 19th century, when the wealthy merchant from the Greek community of Trieste, Antonis Dimitriou, bought the land lot across the royal palace to house his business and family.

King Otto himself approved the designs by Theophil Hansen, a towering figure in Athens’s architectural make over. With 90 rooms, the Dimitriou mansion was the largest residence in the newly established capital.

It was not long after its foundation that the building changed use and owners. For a brief interval, the building housed the French Archaeological School at Athens. At the turn of the century, the building was purchased by visionary Greek hotelier named Efstathios Lampsas, who laid the foundations of luxury tourism in Greece.

When World War II broke out, the hotel housed the Greek Armed Forces headquarters because it had secret underground passages. By the end of the war Greece was already entering a tumultuous civil war (1945-49). In 1944, members of the communist-led resistance movement (EAM), who opposed the British interference in Greece’s domestic politics, planned but did not execute the bombing of the hotel, which housed the British Forces HQ. The operation was called off only at the eleventh hour, after it was made known that Winston Churchill was going to visit the building during a stopover in Greece, to broker a peace deal.