The National and Kapodistrian University of Athens was founded on 3 May 1837 by King Otto I als the Ottonian University gegründet and later named after Ioannis Kapodistrias, the first head of state of independent Greece. It is the oldest university in the eastern Mediterranean area and the second largest in Greece, with over 50,000 students. The main building on Panepistimiou Street was built between 1839 and 1842 to plans by the Danish architect Christian Hansen. Together with the Academy and the National Library it forms the “Athens Trilogy” of clacissist public buildings.
Architect: Christian Hansen; photographer: Neosmyrnian: The University of Athens historic building façade as seen in October 2014 / H πρόσοψη του ιστορικού κτηρίου του Πανεπιστημίου Αθηνών τον Οκτώβριο του 2014; source: Wikimedia Commons, http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:University_of_Athens_facade_in_2014.JPG, Creative Commons License Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0), https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en.