Mycenae

Mycenae, the mythical capital of King Agamemnon, with its Bronze Age citadel, vaulted tombs and Cyclopean walls. According to legend, Agamemnon and his brother Menelaus of Sparta assembled the fleet for Troy here. Hittite archives from the fourteenth and thirteenth centuries BC record a western kingdom called Ahhiyawa, almost certainly associated with the Mycenaean Greeks.

You enter the citadel through the Lion Gate, pass the Grave Circles where Schliemann found his gold, and climb to the palace at the summit, inside walls so massive that later Greeks believed only the Cyclopes could have built them.

Below the citadel lies the Treasury of Atreus, a beehive tomb built around 1250 BC: a vault 14.5 metres across and roughly 13 metres high, made of thirty-three rings of dressed stone closing around a single capstone. It was the largest dome in the world for over a thousand years — nothing surpassed it until the Romans mastered the use of concrete. Mycenae has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1999.

Mycenae is about an hour and a half from Athens. You can visit it on our 10-hour private Argolis tour, together with Epidaurus and Nafplio, or as part of our multi-day tours of the Peloponnese.