Continuously inhabited for five millennia, and at one point the most powerful city in Ancient Greece, Thebes has been overshadowed by its better-known rivals, Athens and Sparta.

According to myth, the city was founded when Kadmos sowed dragon´s teeth into the ground and warriors sprang forth, ready not only to build the fledgling city but to defend it from all-comers. It was Hercules´ birthplace and the home of the Sphinx, whose riddle Oedipus solved, winning the Theban crown and the king´s widow in marriage, little knowing that the widow was his mother, Jocasta.

The city´s history is every bit as rich as its mythic origins, from siding with the Persian invaders when their emperor, Xerxes, set out to conquer Aegean Greece, to siding with Sparta - like Thebes an oligarchy - to defeat Pericles´ democratic Athens, to being utterly destroyed on the orders of Alexander the Great.