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Daily Mirror
Daily Mirror
Travel
Milo Boyd

Inside the abandoned airport once run by Nazis and left to rot due to risky runway

Stray dogs wander the runway and empty terminal building of an airport that used to be Athens main travel hub.

For the past 21 years the Hellinikon has been lying empty, no longer taking in dozens of flights laden with visitors each day.

Before it was shuttered up and left to the dogs, the airport was Athens' only international one for decades and would've been a familiar place to most people coming into the country.

It has a long if not particularly proud early history, having been built in the 1930s and served as a base for the Nazi Luftwaffe during the occupation.

The airport has been out of service for more than 20 years (Ibl/REX/Shutterstock)

Allied air forces regularly rained bombs down on it during WWII, before it was brought back up to shape in a period of post-war investment.

For four decades the Greek government allowed the US military to use it to take off and land, making it an incredibly important strategic base for the Americans.

One of the issues with the airport which eventually contributed to it being taken out of service was how hard it was to land and take-off there.

The runway lay between a narrow strip of flat land between the Aegean Sea and the mountains of the Peloponnese, making touching down risky.

It's been a long time since a plane has graced its runway (Ibl/REX/Shutterstock)

Another reason was how unsuitable the surrounding area was for expansion, and potential security risks in the area.

In 1973 two Palestinian militants claiming affiliation with the Black September Organization fired into the commercial airport's passenger lounge, killing three, wounding 55 and causing widespread terror.

In the 1990s it was decided that the airport should be shut down and replaced with the new Athens International Airport, despite Hellinikon attracting more and more passengers.

The airport has been left to rot for two decades (Ibl/REX/Shutterstock)

When it closed in 2001 13.5million people had travelled through it in 12 months, a yearly increase of 15%.

What to do with the huge patch of land following its closure has been troubling Greek land developer ever since.

The northwest portion of the travel hub was converted to house the canoe slalom, field hockey, baseball and softball at the 2004 Summer Olympics.

Over the next decade plans to turn the rest of the airport into a park and coastal retreat crumbled, in part due to the financial crash of 2008.

Old airport machines have been sitting on the tarmac rusting (Ibl/REX/Shutterstock)

Since then it has been left empty, providing a home for wild animals and people who have fled to Greece seeking asylum.

It was only last year that a very long held plan to invest eight billion euros in the area to convert it into the 'Athens Riviera' was green lit

The Greek government hopes the regenerated airport, which is three times the size of Monaco, will add 75,000 jobs to the economy through beach-front villas, shopping centres and high-end casinos.

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