Argolis Private Tour: Mycenae & Epidaurus – 10 Hours

Outside the walls, below the citadel, is the thing that most people are unprepared for.

A dromos — a walled passage thirty-six metres long — runs straight into the hillside and ends at a doorway. Above that doorway sits a single lintel stone weighing about 120 tonnes. Nobody has fully explained how it was placed. Then you step through, and the space opens up over your head.

The Treasury of Atreus is a beehive vault 14.5 metres across and roughly 13 metres high, built around 1250 BC out of thirty-three rings of dressed stone, each projecting slightly further inward than the one below, until they close around a single capstone. No mortar. The joints are tight enough that a knife blade struggles to enter them, after three thousand three hundred years.

It was the largest dome in the world for over a thousand years — nothing surpassed it until the Romans mastered the use of concrete. And it remains, to this day, the largest corbelled dome ever built by anyone. The Pantheon is bigger, but the Pantheon is concrete. This is stacked rock.

It was named for Atreus, father of Agamemnon, by those who assumed it was his tomb. It was robbed in antiquity — it was never buried, so it was never hidden — and we have no idea who was buried in it. The acoustics inside are extraordinary and everyone discovers this by accident.

Mycenae was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1999.

The theatre of Epidaurus was built in the fourth century BC and cut directly into the hillside, which is why it has survived while grander structures have not — there was nothing to fall down. Fifty-five rows of limestone seating curve around an orchestra of beaten earth, and it holds around fourteen thousand people.

Its reputation rests on the acoustics, and the reputation is earned. A voice speaking normally in the orchestra — not shouting, just speaking — reaches the last row. So does a coin dropped on the stone, a match struck, or a sheet of paper torn. Someone in your group will go down and test it while everyone else climbs to the top. Everyone does this. It works.

How it works is still a matter of debate. The most persuasive explanation is that the limestone seating acts as a filter, damping the low-frequency background noise of a crowd and an open valley while reflecting the higher frequencies of a human voice — the rows themselves are the instrument. Whether the builders understood this or arrived at it by ear, nobody knows.

It is not a ruin under glass. The theatre is still in use: every summer, the Epidaurus Festival stages ancient drama here, in the building for which the plays were written, and it seats a modern audience without modification.

Nafplio is where you stop to eat, and it is the only town on this tour that is simply a good place to be.

It was the first capital of the Greek state, from 1829 onward — the seat of Kapodistrias, the first governor, who was assassinated on the steps of a church here in 1831. The parliament of the new country met in a converted mosque that still stands on the main square. The capital moved to Athens in 1834, and Nafplio has been quietly getting on with itself ever since, which is why it has remained largely intact.

Three fortresses look down on it, all built by people who wanted the harbour. Palamidi, on a hill 216 metres high, is the reason the skyline looks like that: eight self-contained bastions raised by Venetian engineers between 1711 and 1714 — a fortress built in three years, and lost to the Ottomans in 1715, the year after it was finished. There is a staircase of 857 steps up to it, which local legend rounds to 999, and there is also a road. Akronafplia, the older fortress, sits on the ridge behind the town. Bourtzi is the small one on the islet in the middle of the harbour, built by the Venetians in 1471, later the residence of the state executioner — who lived out there because the townspeople would not have him among them.

The old town below is Venetian, Ottoman, and neoclassical within the same three streets: marble paving, balconies on iron brackets, a square of cafés, and a waterfront promenade that runs around the rock to a swimming beach. The Archaeological Museum occupies the Venetian barracks on Syntagma Square and holds, among other things, a complete bronze suit of Mycenaean armour from Dendra — an entire panoply belonging to a warrior who wore it in the fifteenth century BC.