Athens By Night Tour

The Acropolis under floodlight is the image of Athens, and there is nowhere in the city centre you cannot see it from. The Temple of Olympian Zeus stands in an open field of grass with its fifteen columns picked out from below. The Panathenaic Stadium — all marble, and marble takes light differently at night than anything else. Syntagma and the Parliament, with the Evzones still standing at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, as they do around the clock.

Lycabettus is the one people do not expect. It is a limestone cone that rises 277 metres straight out of the middle of the city — the highest point in Athens, higher than the Acropolis, with a small white chapel on top and a view that runs from the mountains to the sea. Athenian legend says Athena dropped it: she was carrying the rock to build up her Acropolis, got bad news, and let it fall where it stands.

From up there, at night, you see what the city is: three million people in a bowl of mountains, and the reason they are there, lit up gold in the middle.

The oldest continuously inhabited quarter of Athens, in the lanes under the north slope of the rock — the village the modern city grew around.

At night it works properly. Cobbled streets closed to cars, tables out, bougainvillea, small Byzantine churches sitting two metres below the modern pavement at the level of the old one, and the Parthenon lit above the rooftops at the end of half the streets.

Down in Piraeus, twenty minutes from the centre: a small round bay ringed with fish tavernas and packed with boats.

The name means little harbour, and it is the third of the three ancient harbours of Piraeus — this is where part of the Athenian fleet was kept, the fleet that won at Salamis and paid for the Parthenon. There is nothing to see of that now. What there is instead is Athenians eating grilled octopus at the water’s edge on a Tuesday night, which is arguably the more useful thing to look at.