Things to do
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Acropolis Museum
Sculptures from the hill above, brought indoors: the Parthenon frieze in its own order on a glass top floor facing the temple, and the original Erechtheion maidens you saw as copies on the rock.
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Acropolis of Athens
Athens's sacred rock puts you face to face with the Parthenon, and beside it the Erechtheion, whose porch rests on six carved women instead of columns.
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Ancient Agora
The marketplace and civic centre where Athenian democracy was actually conducted, and where Socrates argued and was tried. Most of it is foundations among olive trees. Two buildings stand complete: the temple of Hephaestus on its low hill, the most intact Doric temple in Greece, and a long colonnade rebuilt in the 1950s that houses the finds, including the clay ballots used to exile politicians.
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Lake Vouliagmeni
A brackish lake under a limestone cliff on the coast south of the city, fed by warm seawater through flooded caves and by a freshwater spring. The water never drops below 18 degrees Celsius, so swimming continues through winter. A ticketed bathing facility runs the shore with loungers and a café, and small fish nibble at bathers' toes.
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Monastiraki
A square where a metro station, an Ottoman mosque, a Byzantine church and the columns of Hadrian's library share one view with the Acropolis above. The flea market runs off it down Ifestou street: leather sandals, worry beads, old records, brassware. On Sunday mornings the real junk dealers spread out around Avissinias square. Souvlaki shops at the corner trade day and night.
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Mount Lycabettus
A steep limestone cone rising 277 metres out of the Kolonaki district, the highest point in the central city, topped by a white chapel. The view takes in the Acropolis from above, the port of Piraeus and the islands beyond. A funicular runs through a tunnel from the top of Aristippou street; the zigzag footpath through pines takes about half an hour.
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National Archaeological Museum
One building holds the gold of Mycenae, the bronze god lifted from the sea off Cape Artemision and the gears of the Antikythera mechanism, nearly all of it on one floor.
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Odeon of Herodes Atticus
A steep stone theatre built into the south slope of the Acropolis in AD 161 by a wealthy Athenian in memory of his wife, and restored with new marble seating in the 1950s. It can be seen from the path above at any time. The interior opens only for performances, mainly during the summer festival, when five thousand spectators sit under the floodlit Parthenon.
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Panathenaic Stadium
Climb to the upper rows and one view takes in the Acropolis, Lycabettus Hill and the full sweep of seats below, at an ancient stadium you walk into rather than look at from behind a rope.
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Philopappos Hill
A pine-covered hill south-west of the Acropolis, crowned by the marble tomb of a Roman-era prince. Stone paths laid by the architect Dimitris Pikionis wind up from the pedestrian promenade through the trees. Access is free, and from the top the Parthenon stands level with the viewer across the valley, with the sea at Piraeus behind.
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Plaka
The old town on the north slope of the Acropolis, a pedestrian maze of neoclassical houses, souvenir shops and tavernas with hosts working the pavement. Climb higher to Anafiotika, a cluster of whitewashed cube houses built by stonemasons from the island of Anafi in the nineteenth century, who put up what they knew. It feels like a Cycladic village, with cats, directly under the fortress wall.
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Syntagma Square
The city's central square, below the parliament building and the tomb of the unknown soldier. Two presidential guards in pleated kilts and pompom clogs stand motionless there and change on the hour with a slow, high-stepping drill. The full ceremony, with a band and the whole company in white dress uniform, takes place on Sundays at eleven. The national garden behind is shady.
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Temple of Olympian Zeus
Started by Athenian tyrants in the sixth century BC and abandoned for lack of money, this colossal temple was finally completed by the emperor Hadrian more than six hundred years later. Fifteen of its original 104 Corinthian columns remain standing, seventeen metres tall. A sixteenth lies in segments where a storm toppled it in 1852. Hadrian's triumphal arch stands at the corner of the site.
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Temple of Poseidon at Sounion
Down the coast road from Athens, the land runs out at Poseidon's temple, with open sea on three sides and, on a clear evening, the sun dropping straight into the water beyond it.
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Benaki Museum
A family mansion on Vasilissis Sofias avenue holds Greek art from prehistoric gold to the costumes, jewellery and paintings of recent centuries. Upstairs, two panelled and painted reception rooms taken from eighteenth-century mansions in Kozani are the highlight. Admission is ticketed, and the rooftop café looks over the National Garden toward the Acropolis.
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Hotel Grande Bretagne
The grand hotel of Athens, facing Syntagma Square and the parliament since 1874. Public rooms keep their marble, chandeliers and tapestries, and the rooftop restaurant and bar look straight across to the Acropolis. A spa with an indoor pool sits below. The metro, including the airport line, stops under the square outside.
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Kerameikos
The ancient city cemetery on the north-west edge of the centre, where the road to Eleusis left Athens through the Sacred Gate. Marble grave stelae and family enclosures line the Street of Tombs, and tortoises wander the grass along the old Eridanos stream bed. The ticket includes a small site museum with the original carvings, among them a large kouros found at the gate.
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Museum of Cycladic Art
A private museum in Kolonaki built around the Goulandris family's collection of marble figurines from the Cyclades: folded-arm women with spare, flat faces that later fascinated modern sculptors. The galleries are small and dim, with light picked out on each piece. A glass walkway links the modern building to the neoclassical Stathatos Mansion, which holds temporary exhibitions.
