Athens, 185 years later

Is Athens a successful city? Given everything such a simplistic definition entails, I would say that, yes, it is. I also believe that most Athenians would vote it as their top favorite if they were asked to, despite all its ills. The issue of Athens has been at the fore recently as a result of the 185th anniversary of being proclaimed capital of the small kingdom of Greece, at the tip of southeastern Europe, with nothing but the Ottoman Empire to its north.
Athens has experienced cataclysmic changes from September 1834 to the present. It was born as an urban experiment imbued by the qualities of romantic idealism, supported by middle-class and wealthy diaspora Greeks and nurtured in the spirit of philhellenism espoused by King Otto and Queen Amalia. These facts may be supposed to be common knowledge, if only as the titles of different chapters in the city's history, yet that...