History of Athens (server)

The following page is a non-canonical, factual history of the development of the Minecraft server in which Athens is hosted on. It is not an accurate representation of Athens lore.
The Athens server was launched on March 16, 2019, by Ultracane1997 and Sassy156, the latter of which chose Athens as the name of the city. Over the next few days, a lot of users joined, and within a week, the now-iconic Skyscraper Row looked somewhat like it is today. Sassy156 quit the server just a few days after it was created, and decided to demolish his house for unknown reasons. The Athens name for the server itself was chosen because Athens was the first city built on the server. 
In late March 2019, the eastward expansion of the server began, with the foundation of Trevorville. In April 2019, the towns of Joaninha, Milton and Nowhere were created, along with the cities of Pripyat and Cherkasy. Later that month, player feebwing copied several Pripyat buildings and jokingly made a city called "Novo-Arkhangelsk" about 1000 blocks south of Athens proper. MoneyHurricane eventually found the city and blew it up, with the area being replaced by a lake in future Laketon. AsrielTheLatvian (then known as Velocitracker) liked the Novo-Arkhangelsk city idea, and decided to build a new city feebwing about 5000 blocks south of Athens. The city then developed into Novo-Arkhangelsk. 
In May 2019, the city of Tortuga was created by now-inactive player Olo72. Alvinburg was also established during that timeframe. By summer 2019, the activity of the server began to decline. 
The server was temporarily offline for a time in late 2019, after the infamous Sponge Grief, in which an unknown perpetrator placed numerous sponge spheres around downtown Athens. It was revived in February 2020, with new plugins added, such as ImageOnMap. During 2020, the server expanded rapidly, with many new towns being developed. 
On January 13, 2021, the server gained a Dynmap for the first time. On December 21, 2021, Athens was updated to 1.18.1, raising the height limit to y=320 and lowering it to y=-64. 
2022 began with the January 8 incident, when player faaeebian accidentally selected 5,307,380 blocks and performed the //stack WorldEdit command. While the server was promptly restarted, it was rolled back by three days due to the crash preventing faaeebian from undoing the command and damage due to falling sand. This caused the structures built between January 5 and January 8 to be lost, although these were recovered with the help of players BerndTubus and ImNotJakub.
== Version History ==
* March 16, 2019-May 2019: 1.13.x
* May 2019-February 2020: 1.14.x
* February-July 2020: 1.15.x
* July 2020-December 1, 2021: 1.16.x 
* December 1, 2021 - December 21, 2021: 1.17.x
* December 21, 2021 - July 8, 2023: 1.18.1
* July 8, 2023 - present: 1.20.1