Half Day Athens City Tour

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 went up 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 Propylaea you walk through, and the small perfect Temple of Athena Nike on its bastion.

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 cross on a glass floor before you reach a single exhibit.

Its 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 largest temple ever built in Greece, and it took nearly seven centuries. The Athenians began it in the sixth century BC and gave up; it stood half-finished long enough for Aristotle to use it as a lesson in political vanity. Hadrian finished it in the second century AD and put a statue of himself next to the statue of the god.

Fifteen columns stand. A sixteenth lies where a storm dropped it in the nineteenth century, in sections, like a stack of coins knocked over — which is exactly how the columns were assembled, and you cannot see that at a standing temple.

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), abandoned for sixteen centuries, then dug out and restored for the first modern Olympic Games in 1896. Still in use.

At Syntagma, the Parliament — built as a royal palace for Greece’s first king — and in front of it the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, guarded by the Evzones in the pleated foustanella and the shoes with pompoms. The guard changes every hour, on the hour. The slow high step is not decoration: it is how you march in that footwear. The full ceremony, with the band, is Sunday at 11am.

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 build a modern city from nothing. What went up along Panepistimiou Street is 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 in a row, painted and gilded in the colours the Greeks knew their ancient temples had actually been.

Nearby, in the National Garden, the Zappeion, built for the revival of the Olympic Games.