This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Greece gathers three cities that carry both a classical religious history stretching back centuries before Christianity and a documented place in its earliest spread.
Athens rises around the Acropolis, ritual home of Athena and the leading city state of classical Greece; its religious life spans the Panathenaic festival, the Areopagus court where Paul the Apostle preached to a philosophical audience, and, nearby at Eleusis, the Mysteries of Demeter and Persephone. Christianized by the sixth century CE, its temples were reconsecrated first as churches and later, under Ottoman rule, as mosques.
Corinth, a Roman colony refounded on the site of a destroyed Greek city, received two of Paul's letters, which describe the internal life of an early Christian congregation in more detail than almost any other New Testament text; the Greek city had been known for its sanctuary of Aphrodite on the Acrocorinth above it, and part of the temple of Apollo still stands.
Thessalonica received the earliest surviving letter of Paul, making its Christian community among the oldest attested in Europe; it became the second city of the Byzantine empire, home to Cyril and Methodius, who devised a Slavonic alphabet and translated the liturgy for the Moravian mission, and its Sephardi Jewish population, the majority of the city for much of the Ottoman period, was deported and murdered in 1943.
All three carried a pre Christian religious life so old that Paul's own letters arrived as the newer layer, not the founding one.