Full Day Athens City Sightseeing Tour (8 hours)

This is the reason to take the eight-hour tour. It holds the richest collection of Greek antiquity in the world, and it is not a museum about Athens — it is the museum where everything went.

The Antikythera Mechanism. Sponge divers found a wreck off a small island in 1900 and brought up bronzes, marbles and one shapeless green lump that sat in a case for a year before it split and showed a gear tooth. It is a geared astronomical calculator from around the first century BC — it tracked the sun, the moon, the planets, the eclipse cycle and the four-year schedule of the Olympic Games. Nothing of comparable complexity survives from anywhere for the next fourteen hundred years. It is in a room with the fragments, the reconstructions and the X-rays, and it is arguably the most extraordinary object in Greece.

The Mycenaean gold. Everything Schliemann took out of the shaft graves in 1876 is here — the diadems, the inlaid daggers, the cups, and the beaten gold death mask he cabled the world about. He was wrong about the name: it is three centuries too early to be Agamemnon’s. He was not wrong that he had found a lost civilisation. If you have been to Mycenae, this is where the contents went.

The Artemision Bronze. A god pulled out of the sea off Cape Artemision, over two metres tall, mid-throw, arms wide — and nobody can agree whether he is Zeus about to launch a thunderbolt or Poseidon about to launch a trident, because whatever was in his right hand is gone. From the same wreck: the Jockey of Artemision, a small boy riding a galloping horse, his face pure terror, from around 140 BC — and there is nothing else like it left.

Also here: the Cycladic figurines, the Antikythera Youth, the frescoes from Akrotiri on Santorini, and the Egyptian collection.

The rock has been occupied since the Neolithic, but what stands on it was built in one burst in the fifth century BC, after the Persians burned everything that was there before.

The Parthenon was raised in fifteen years and has almost no straight lines in it: the columns lean inward, the floor swells upward, the corner columns are thicker than the rest. Every correction is invisible, and all of them together are why it looks the way it does.

Around it: the Erechtheion, with the Caryatids holding the porch — the ones on the rock are copies. The Propylaea, the gateway you walk through. The Temple of Athena Nike on its bastion, small and perfect. And below the south slope, the Odeon of Herodes Atticus, built in the second century AD by a wealthy Athenian in memory of his wife, and still used every summer for the Athens Festival.

The Acropolis has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1987.

The building is the argument. It stands at the foot of the rock on pillars, above an excavated Athenian neighbourhood you walk across on a glass floor before reaching a single exhibit.

The top floor is set at the same angle as the Parthenon and glazed on all four sides, so the frieze hangs at the height and orientation it was carved for, with the actual building visible through the glass three hundred metres away. Where a panel is missing, a white plaster cast stands in its place. Five of the six original Caryatids are downstairs. The sixth is in London.

The Parliament was built as a palace for Greece’s first king. In front of it is the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, and in front of that stand the Evzones, in the pleated foustanella and the shoes with pompoms — a uniform that reads as decorative and was field dress in the mountains during the War of Independence.

The guard changes every hour, on the hour. The slow high step is not ceremony for its own sake — it is how you march in that footwear. The full ceremony, with the band, is Sunday at 11am.

The Kallimarmaro — “beautiful marble” — is the only stadium in the world built entirely of it.

It began in the fourth century BC as an earth bank for the Panathenaic Games. Herodes Atticus — the same man who built the Odeon below the Acropolis — rebuilt it in marble in the second century AD. Then it was abandoned for sixteen centuries and quarried for stone, and dug out again and restored for the first modern Olympic Games in 1896, in its ancient shape: a long horseshoe with turns tight enough that the runners of 1896 lost time at every corner. It is still in use.

When Athens became a capital in the 1830s it was a town of a few thousand people around a ruined rock, and it had to invent a modern city from nothing. What it built along Panepistimiou Street is the Athenian Trilogy — the University, the Academy of Athens and the National Library, three neoclassical buildings in a row, painted and gilded in the colours the Greeks knew their ancient temples had actually been.

Nearby, in the National Garden, stands the Zappeion, built for the revival of the Olympics.

The oldest continuously inhabited quarter of Athens, in the lanes under the north slope of the rock — the village the modern city grew around, and the only part that survived the nineteenth-century rebuilding. Cobbled streets, courtyards, bougainvillea, and small Byzantine churches sitting two metres below the modern pavement, at the level of the old one.