Athens & Cape Sounio Tour

The Acropolis and the Parthenon, built in fifteen years in the fifth century BC after the Persians burned everything that was there before — with almost no straight lines in it: the columns lean inward, the floor swells upward, and every correction is invisible. Around it the Erechtheion with its Caryatids, and below the south slope the Odeon of Herodes Atticus, built in the second century AD and still used every summer for the Athens Festival. The Acropolis has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1987.

The Acropolis Museum stands at the foot of the rock on pillars, above an excavated Athenian neighbourhood you cross on a glass floor. Its top floor is set at the angle of the Parthenon and glazed on all sides, so the frieze hangs where it was carved to hang, with the building itself visible through the glass.

The Temple of Olympian Zeus took nearly seven centuries — begun in the sixth century BC, abandoned half-built long enough for Aristotle to use it as a lesson in vanity, and finished by Hadrian, who added a statue of himself beside the god. Fifteen columns stand; a sixteenth lies where a storm dropped it, in sections, like a stack of coins knocked over.

The Panathenaic Stadium — the Kallimarmaro, “beautiful marble” — is the only stadium in the world built entirely of it. Begun in the fourth century BC as an earth bank, rebuilt in marble by Herodes Atticus (the same man as the Odeon), then quarried and forgotten for sixteen centuries, and dug out again for the first modern Olympics in 1896.

At Syntagma, the Parliament was built in 1843 as the palace of King Otto, Greece’s first king. In front of it, the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier and the Evzones of the Presidential Guard, in the pleated foustanella — the guard changes every hour, on the hour; the full ceremony with the band is Sunday at 11am.

Around the corner, in the National Garden, the Zappeion — built in 1888 and named for Evangelos Zappas, the Greek who spent his fortune trying to revive the Olympic Games decades before anyone listened, and who did not live to see 1896.

And along Panepistimiou, the Athens Trilogy: the University in the middle, the National Library on one side and the Academy of Athens on the other — three neoclassical buildings raised when Athens was a town of a few thousand people that had just been told it was a capital.

The drive out is the Athenian Riviera: forty-odd miles of coast road south from the city, past the marinas and the beaches, to the point where Attica runs out.

The Temple of Poseidon is on the headland, and it is one temple on a cliff — that is all it is, and it is enough. Sixty metres of rock, water on three sides, and on a clear day the islands of Kea and Kythnos out in the haze.

It was built 444–440 BC on the ruins of an earlier temple the Persians destroyed in 480. The columns are local Agrileza marble, thinner than the Doric norm — the architect cut them slender, possibly against the wind on an exposed cape. Inside stood a bronze Poseidon over six metres tall. Fifteen of the thirty-four columns are still up, after two and a half thousand years of salt and earthquakes.