Full Day Athens City Tour (6 Hours)

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

The Parthenon is the reason people come — a temple to Athena built in fifteen years, with almost no straight lines in it: the columns lean inward, the floor bulges upward, the corner columns are thicker. Every correction is invisible and all of them together are why it looks the way it does.

Around it: the Erechtheion, with the six Caryatids holding up the porch — the ones on the rock are copies; five of the originals are in the museum below and the sixth is in London. The Propylaea, the monumental gateway you walk through. And the Temple of Athena Nike on the bastion, small and perfect.

Below the south slope stands the Odeon of Herodes Atticus, built in 161 AD by a wealthy Athenian in memory of his wife. It is still in use — the Athens Festival stages opera and drama in it every summer.

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

The top floor is set at the same angle as the Parthenon and glazed on all four sides, so the frieze is displayed 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, there is a white plaster cast in its place. The point is not subtle and it is not meant to be.

The largest temple ever built in Greece, and it took almost seven centuries to finish. The Athenians began it in the sixth century BC, gave up, and left it standing half-built for so long that Aristotle used it as an example of political vanity. Hadrian completed it in the second century AD and put a statue of himself next to the statue of Zeus.

Of its original hundred-odd columns, fifteen are standing. A sixteenth lies where it fell in a storm in the nineteenth century, in sections, like a stack of coins knocked over — which is exactly how the columns were built, and you can see it in a way you cannot at any standing temple.

The Parliament was built as a royal 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 of the Presidential Guard, in the pleated foustanella and the shoes with pompoms — a uniform that looks decorative and was field dress in the mountains during the War of Independence.

The guard changes every hour, on the hour. They move in a slow, deliberate high step that is not ceremony for its own sake — it is how you march in that footwear without breaking your ankle. The full ceremony, with the band, is on 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 under the Acropolis — rebuilt it in marble in the second century AD, and then it was abandoned for sixteen hundred years and quarried for stone.

It was dug out and restored for the first modern Olympic Games in 1896, in the shape it had in antiquity: a long horseshoe with turns so tight that the runners of 1896 lost seconds at every corner. It is still used — the Olympic flame is handed over here before every Games.

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 been.

Nearby, in the National Garden, the Zappeion was built for the revival of the Olympics, and hosted the first modern fencing events.

The oldest continuously inhabited neighbourhood in Athens, in the lanes under the north slope of the Acropolis — the village the city grew around, and the only part of it that survived the nineteenth-century rebuilding.

Cobbled pedestrian streets, houses with courtyards and bougainvillea, the small Byzantine churches sitting at the level of the old street two metres below the modern one. It is where you stop walking and have a coffee.