Athens

Athens has finally become a city you can recommend for more than the Acropolis. The 15 years since the 2004 Olympic upgrade and the financial crisis that followed have produced a small generation of serious restaurants and contemporary galleries. A confident art scene is anchored by the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Cultural Center on the southern coast (Renzo Piano, 2016) and the Onassis Stegi on Syngrou. The city no longer asks to be seen only as ruins.

Plaka, the quarter of lanes and bougainvillea under the Acropolis, is the cliché and is fine for a first night. Koukaki, on the southern slope of the rock, is the honest recommendation: residential, within walking distance of the Acropolis Museum, and with the better restaurants. Kolonaki is the shopping quarter. It has the small museums (Benaki, Goulandris, Cycladic Art) and the higher price tags. Avoid Omonia and the streets right around the central market unless you have a specific destination in mind.

Go to the Acropolis at opening (8am in summer) or as late as possible before closing. The middle of the day brings heatstroke and crowds. The Acropolis Museum, by Bernard Tschumi, holds the surviving Parthenon sculptures that the British Museum does not. The Ancient Agora, north-west of the Acropolis, is the open ground where Socrates was tried and Plato walked. Anafiotika is a cluster of small whitewashed houses tucked into the northern flank of the Acropolis. Stonemasons from the Cyclades built it in the 1840s, homesick after they were summoned to build King Otto’s palace.

The Athens Riviera runs south along the coast from Faliro to Sounion, where the Temple of Poseidon stands on a cliff above the sea. The drive takes about an hour, and the temple at sunset is worth the round trip. Spend three nights in Athens before any island week, or four if you want to see the National Archaeological Museum on Patission at the right pace. Among much else, it holds the Antikythera mechanism.

House Notes

  1. Arrival

    Helistar flies three Airbus helicopter types, the AS365 Dauphin, the H135 and the H120, from its heliport at Koropi. Its island transfers are timed for day trips: Mykonos in around 36 minutes, Santorini in 52 and Amanzoe in 22. The base operates every day from 7am to 9pm.

  2. The address

    The Hotel Grande Bretagne stands on the corner of Vasileos Georgiou A' and Panepistimiou, on Syntagma Square. It was built as a private house in 1842, and Efstathios Lampsas turned it into a hotel in 1874. It is now part of Marriott’s Luxury Collection under Lampsa Hellenic Hotels. The 320 rooms and the Roof Garden Restaurant have the Acropolis view that the Plaka hotels lack.

  3. The Riviera

    The Four Seasons Astir Palace sits on the Lemos Peninsula at Vouliagmeni: 303 rooms across 100 acres, three private beaches, and ten restaurants and bars, Pelagos and Matsuhisa among them. It is half an hour from the Acropolis, for a trip where a base in the city does not suit.

  4. Goulandris

    The Basil & Elise Goulandris Foundation opened at 13 Eratosthenous in Pangrati on 2 October 2019. It fills a 1920s neoclassical mansion with a new extension that descends five floors below ground. The collection runs through Cézanne, Van Gogh, Gauguin, Monet, Degas, Picasso, Braque, Miró and Giacometti, with Tsarouchis and Hadjikyriakos-Ghika on the Greek floors. A 1966 portrait of Elise by Chagall greets visitors at the entrance.

  5. The Cycladic

    The Museum of Cycladic Art keeps its permanent collection at 4 Neofytou Douka and its temporary exhibitions in the Stathatos Mansion next door, at Vasilissis Sofias and Irodotou. The permanent holding is among the most important collections of Cycladic art anywhere: the slender, flat-faced marble figurines of the third millennium BC that moved Brancusi and Moore. The museum closes on Tuesdays.

  6. Spondi

    Spondi, at Pyrronos 5 in Pangrati, is French throughout, under head chef Arnaud Bignon. It is the French table against which the other restaurants in the city are measured. The neoclassical courtyard is the setting in the city for a dinner when the night calls for a slow pace.

  7. The Odeon

    The Odeon of Herodes Atticus is cut into the southern slope of the Acropolis, on Dionysiou Areopagitou. Herodes Atticus built it in AD 161 in memory of his wife Regilla: a steep marble theatre of 33 rows seating around 5,000, once roofed in cedar of Lebanon. The seating and the orchestra were repaved in Pentelic marble in the 1950s. Walk past it at dusk, the quiet hour.

  8. Mesogaia

    Domaine Papagiannakos works 70-year-old Savatiano bush vines at Markopoulo in the Mesogaia plain, east of the Acropolis. The roots reach down 20 metres for water and minerals. The Attic Savatiano from the old vines is the white that goes with the city’s tomato dishes, and a tasting fits the morning before a flight to the islands.

  9. The pathway

    Between 1954 and 1957, Dimitris Pikionis paved a path of reclaimed stone from the foot of the Acropolis to the top of Filopappou Hill: lintels, doorsteps and rough-finished marble. He chose the materials from classical buildings being demolished elsewhere in Athens. Walk it at first light, before the buses reach the Acropolis entrance.

  10. Vouliagmeni

    Lake Vouliagmeni is a brackish thermal pool, fed from the Saronic by an underwater channel through flooded caves. It holds between 21 and 29°C all year. The water carries hydrogen sulphide, and the place has worked as a spa since the late nineteenth century. It opens every day from 8am to 7pm, and it takes no bookings for the same day.

Anchorage Notes

  1. Flisvos Marina

    Flisvos Marina at Palaio Faliro is the address for the largest yachts on the Athens coast. It is the LAMDA marina, rebuilt in 2002 to international standards for megayachts and superyachts, with restaurants and shops along a promenade on the quay. A yacht here is within reach of the city and the airport, with the Saronic Gulf opening to the south, and the great hulls of the Aegean summer lie here between charters.

  2. Zea Marina

    Zea, also called Pasalimani, is the round harbour of Piraeus and is now the D-Marin megayacht marina, with some 500 berths for hulls up to 150 metres. It lies 3 kilometres from the main commercial port and is a gateway to the Saronic Gulf and the Cyclades. A yacht lies in the round basin, with the town rising around it in tiers.

  3. Alimos Marina

    Alimos, at Kalamaki south of the centre, is the largest marina in Greece, with some 1,100 berths across a vast basin of land and water, 50 of them for yachts over 25 metres. It is the charter capital of the country: the fleets keep their offices in the Yacht Charter Village along the quay, and the bareboats (yachts chartered without crew) and crewed yachts of a Greek summer set out from here. A yacht lies among a thousand others.

  4. Piraeus

    Piraeus is the chief port of Greece and the gateway to its islands, among the busiest passenger ports in Europe, with 4 million travellers and the ferries of the whole Aegean passing through it in a year. A yacht has no use for the commercial quays. Beside them lies Mikrolimano, the Munichia of the ancients: a small round harbour lined with seafood tavernas that face the boats.

Mythology

  1. Poseidon

    On the Acropolis, the Greek traveller Pausanias saw a mark said to come from Poseidon’s trident, and a stone tank of sea water inside the Erechtheum temple that sounded like waves when a south wind blew. The Acropolis Museum holds pieces thought to come from the Poseidon on the Parthenon’s west pediment, the carved triangle under the roof, which showed his contest with Athena.

  2. Demeter

    At Eleusis, Demeter sits beside the Maiden Well, joins the house of King Celeus and orders a temple built above Callichorus. The sanctuary later held the Eleusinian Mysteries, secret rites that echo the hymn’s refusal to describe what Demeter taught.

  3. Athena

    Athens traced its name and its protecting goddess to Athena’s victory over Poseidon on the Acropolis. The west pediment of the Parthenon showed their contest, and the Acropolis Museum holds fragments of its huge figure of Athena.

  4. Ares

    The Areopagus took its name in myth from the trial at which 12 gods cleared Ares of killing his daughter’s attacker. The temple later given to him in the Agora was an older building of Athena, moved from Pallene in the Roman period.

  5. Aeschylus

    The Oresteia won first prize at the festival of Dionysus in Athens in 458 BC. In Eumenides, Athena appoints Athenian citizens to judge Orestes on the Hill of Ares, sets up the court for bloodshed and gives the Erinyes honours and a home in the city.

  6. Apollodorus

    The Library gives Athens its foundation in Book 3: Poseidon strikes the middle of the acropolis and raises the sea called Erechtheis, Athena plants the olive with Cecrops as her witness, and the twelve gods award her the country, after which she names the city after herself (3.14.1). The author adds that the olive tree is still shown in the Pandrosium, on the acropolis, in his own day.

  7. Boreas

    Beside the Ilissos in Athens, Boreas carries away the Athenian princess Oreithyia and later receives a sacred precinct. Herodotus says the Athenians called on their divine son-in-law before a storm struck the Persian fleet at Artemisium.

  8. Daedalus

    Apollodorus and Diodorus both say Daedalus was born in Athens and was tried there before the court of the Areopagus for killing his sister’s son. Both make the verdict the reason he left for Crete, and Diodorus adds that he first hid in a deme, a country district, of Attica.

  9. Eileithyia

    Eileithyia’s temple at Athens held three fully draped wooden images. Local women told Pausanias that two were gifts from Crete and the oldest had come from Delos, so both rival origins stood in one sanctuary.

  10. Eros

    Pausanias saw an altar to Eros in front of the Academy and another, inside Athens, to Anteros. The second recalled the tragic story of Timagoras and Meles, and turned rejected desire into the worship of love answered or avenged.

  11. Euripides

    The Sanctuary and Theatre of Dionysus in Athens was the setting of the City Dionysia and of the first performances of works by Euripides. Medea and Helen survive as staged versions of myth produced for that setting.

  12. Hebe

    At Kynosarges in Athens, Pausanias records an altar of Hebe beside the altar of Heracles. Altars of Heracles’s mother Alcmene and his companion Iolaus stood in the same sacred place.

  13. Iphigenia

    Euripides has the goddess Athena make Iphigenia a priestess of Artemis at Brauron and give her a burial there. The Greek traveller Pausanias records the local claim that Iphigenia brought the Taurian image of Artemis to Brauron, but he doubts that the image shown there was the original.

  14. Mnemosyne

    Pausanias records images of Mnemosyne and of her daughters the Muses in the Athenian precinct of Dionysus Melpomenus, Dionysus the Minstrel. They stood beside figures of Athena and Zeus and an Apollo dedicated and made by Eubulides.

  15. Nemesis

    At Rhamnous in Attica, Nemesis had a sanctuary and a marble statue for worship, which Pausanias describes. There she was linked with the punishment of the Persian army defeated at nearby Marathon.

  16. Nike

    The Temple of Athena Nike stands on a bastion, a raised stone platform, beside the Acropolis gateway and honours Athena as the giver of victory. The Classical building replaced an earlier shrine, and it has been taken apart and rebuilt again and again since its stones were reused in fortifications in 1686.

  17. Orestes

    Aeschylus brings Orestes to the Areopagus, where Athena sets up a court to hear the case the Erinyes bring against him. The Greek traveller Pausanias later records a sanctuary of these goddesses beside the hill.

  18. Persephone

    Near Eleusis, Pausanias records a place called Erineus where Hades was said to go down below with Persephone after the abduction. Inside the sanctuary, a separate shrine, the Plutoneion, joined the ruler of the underworld to the rites of Demeter and her daughter.

  19. Prometheus

    Prometheus had an altar in the Academy at Athens, and runners carried burning torches from it towards the city. Pausanias says the winner had to keep his flame alight; if every torch went out, the race had no winner.

  20. Scylla

    The National Archaeological Museum in Athens holds two bronze Scyllas, among them a figurine found at Kataphylli in Karditsa and dated to the late fourth century BC, displayed in Room 36, Showcase 11 of the Bronze Metalwork Collection. She is a woman to the waist, with dog heads at her hips and a fish tail, which is not the creature Homer described.

  21. Sophocles

    Plutarch places Sophocles’s first win in the Athenian drama contest, where Cimon and the other nine generals judged him against Aeschylus. Oedipus at Colonus was staged in Athens in 401 BC, after Sophocles’s death, and its ending turns on Attic ground, the protection of Theseus and the secret place of the tomb of Oedipus.

  22. The Amazonomachy

    Athens tied the Amazonomachy to the Areopagus and repeated the battle across the 14 west metopes of the Parthenon. The Acropolis Museum holds four of those metopes, and nine remain on the temple.

  23. The Amphiareion at Oropos

    The Amphiareion at Oropos in Attica was the oracle where visitors sacrificed a ram, slept on its skin and waited for Amphiaraus to answer through a dream. Pausanias also records the sanctuary spring into which a person who had been cured threw silver or gold.

  24. The Anemoi

    In the Roman Agora of Athens, the eight-sided Horologion of Andronikos carries carved figures of eight winds, each facing its own direction and marked by its own symbols. Sundials, a weather vane and a water-powered mechanism made the winds part of a working instrument.

  25. The Centaurs

    The Parthenon's south metopes, carved 445 to 440 BC and held today in the Acropolis Museum, set the war between the Centaurs and the Lapiths along the temple's long sides; metope 1 shows a Centaur gripping a Lapith by the neck as the Lapith drives a spear into his belly, the fight still undecided in the stone.

  26. The City Dionysia

    The City Dionysia was held at the sanctuary of Dionysus Eleuthereus on the south slope of the Athenian Acropolis, which Pausanias calls the god’s oldest sanctuary and where he saw two temples and two statues, one of them the ivory and gold work of Alcamenes. The theatre stands above it. The sanctuary dates to after the middle of the sixth century BC, and in its final form the auditorium held 16,000.

  27. The Dioscuri

    Pausanias records an ancient sanctuary of the Dioscuri in Athens, below the enclosure of Aglaurus. It held standing statues of the twins, their sons on horseback and paintings by Polygnotus and Micon.

  28. The Eleusinian Mysteries

    The City Eleusinion, the sanctuary of Eleusinian Demeter on the north slope of the Acropolis, was the Athenian end of the Mysteries, and Pausanias names it and then refuses to describe it, saying a vision in a dream stopped him. The yearly procession that carried Iacchus along the road to Eleusis began there, and Plutarch records that while the Spartans held Deceleia the rite went by sea, until Alcibiades led it back along the land road behind his infantry.

  29. The Erinyes

    Aeschylus places the Erinyes at Orestes’s trial on the Areopagus and gives them an honoured home in Athens after the verdict. Pausanias later records their sanctuary beside the hill, where the Athenians worshipped them as the Semnai Theai.

  30. The Gigantomachy

    The east metopes of the Parthenon, carved in the 440s BC and now in the Acropolis Museum, set the Gigantomachy over the main entrance of the temple with Athena at its centre. Plato has Socrates point to the same battle woven, once every four years, into the robe carried up to the Acropolis at the festival of the Panathenaea.

  31. The Isthmian Games

    Plutarch gives the festival a second founder and makes him Athenian. Theseus set the boundary pillar on the Isthmus and instituted games there for Poseidon, and he fixed with the Corinthians that Athenian visitors would hold a place of honour as large as the sail of the state galley that carried them, stretched to its full extent.

  32. The Panathenaia

    Pausanias saw the ship built for the procession of the Panathenaea standing near the Hill of Ares at Athens, and thought only the nine-banked vessel at Delos was larger. The prizes left with the winners and came back in pieces: the Acropolis Museum holds a fragment of a Panathenaic amphora painted with a boxing match, dug up east of the Parthenon in 1886 and dated to the last quarter of the sixth century BC.

  33. The Ploutonion at Eleusis

    Inside the sanctuary at Eleusis, west of the Lesser Propylaea, two shallow caves and the foundations of two temples built in turn formed a walled area sacred to Pluto. Reliefs of Pluto and Persephone identify the place, while the exact use of the caves and pits remains unresolved.

  34. The Thesmophoria

    The Athenian Thesmophoria is the setting of Aristophanes’s Women at the Thesmophoria, where the women pray for Athens, conduct an assembly and discover a male intruder. An excavated sanctuary near the Pnyx has been proposed as the city’s Thesmophorion, but the identification remains an argument rather than a secure fact.

  35. Theseus

    Theseus is king of Athens in the myth, and the city kept his ship and his bones. Plutarch says the Athenians preserved his ship down to the time of Demetrius Phalereus, and buried his bones, brought from Skyros on Cimon's trireme, in the heart of the city, where the tomb became a refuge for runaway slaves.