Athens

Athens has finally become a city you can recommend, and not only for the Acropolis. The fifteen years since the 2004 Olympic upgrade and the financial crisis that followed have produced a small generation of serious restaurants, contemporary galleries, and a confident art scene 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 experienced only as ruins.

A word on basing. Plaka, the lane-and-bougainvillea quarter 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: walking distance to the Acropolis Museum, residential, with the better restaurants. Kolonaki is the shopping quarter and holds the small museums (Benaki, Goulandris, Cycladic Art) along with the heavier price tags. Avoid Omonia and the streets immediately around the central market unless you have a specific destination in mind.

Go to the Acropolis at opening (eight in summer) or as late as possible before closing; the middle of the day is heatstroke and crowds. The Acropolis Museum, by Bernard Tschumi, holds the surviving Parthenon sculptures 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, the cluster of small white-washed houses tucked into the Acropolis's northern flank, was built in the 1840s by Cycladic stonemasons summoned to construct King Otto's palace and feeling homesick.

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. Three nights in Athens before any island week; four if you want to take the National Archaeological Museum on Patission at the right pace. It holds, among much else, the Antikythera mechanism.

House Notes

  1. Arrival

    Helistar operates a fleet of three Airbus types — AS365 Dauphin, H135, H120 — from its heliport at Koropi. Island transfers are calibrated for day trips: Mykonos in around 36 minutes, Santorini 52, Amanzoe 22. The fleet base operates daily, 07:00 to 21:00.

  2. The address

    The Hotel Grande Bretagne stands on the corner of Vasileos Georgiou A' and Panepistimiou on Syntagma Square — built as a private residence in 1842, converted to a hotel by Efstathios Lampsas in 1874, now part of Marriott's Luxury Collection under Lampsa Hellenic Hotels. The 320 rooms and the Roof Garden Restaurant carry the Acropolis view the Plaka hotels do not.

  3. The Riviera

    The Four Seasons Astir Palace sits on the Lemos Peninsula at Vouliagmeni — 303 rooms across 100 acres, three private beaches, ten restaurants and bars including Pelagos and Matsuhisa. Half an hour from the Acropolis when the city is the wrong shape for the trip.

  4. Goulandris

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

  5. The Cycladic

    The Museum of Cycladic Art keeps its permanent collection at 4 Neofytou Douka and its temporary programme in the adjacent Stathatos Mansion at Vasilissis Sofias and Irodotou. The standing 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. Closed Tuesdays.

  6. Spondi

    Spondi at Pyrronos 5 in Pangrati, under head chef Arnaud Bignon and French throughout — the French table against which the city's others are measured. The neoclassical courtyard is the dinner setting in the city when the night calls for slow.

  7. The Odeon

    The Odeon of Herodes Atticus, cut into the southern slope of the Acropolis on Dionysiou Areopagitou — raised in AD 161 by Herodes Atticus in memory of his wife Regilla, a steep marble auditorium of 33 rows seating around 5,000 under a roof once of cedar of Lebanon. The audience stands and orchestra were repaved in Pentelic marble in the 1950s. The walk past it at dusk is 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 run 20 metres for water and minerals. The Attic Savatiano of the old vines is the white that pairs with the city's tomato; a tasting fits the morning before an island flight.

  9. The pathway

    Dimitris Pikionis paved a path of reclaimed stone — lintels, stoops, rough-finished marble — from the base of the Acropolis to the apex of Filopappou Hill between 1954 and 1957. He chose the materials from classical buildings being demolished elsewhere in Athens. Walk it at first light, before the buses reach the Acropolis gate.

  10. Vouliagmeni

    Lake Vouliagmeni, a brackish thermal pool replenished from the Saronic by an underwater channel through flooded caves, holds 21–29°C year-round. The water carries hydrogen sulphide; the place has functioned as a spa since the late nineteenth century. Open daily 08:00 to 19:00; same-day reservations are not taken.

Anchorage Notes

  1. Flisvos Marina

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

  2. Zea Marina

    Zea — Pasalimani — is the round harbour of Piraeus, now the D-Marin megayacht marina: some five hundred berths taking hulls to a hundred and fifty metres, named best superyacht marina of its year. Three kilometres from the great commercial port, it is a gateway to the Saronic and the Cyclades. A yacht lies in the deep round basin, the amphitheatre of the town rising around it.

  3. Alimos Marina

    Alimos, at Kalamaki south of the centre, is the largest marina in Greece — some eleven hundred berths across a vast basin of land and water, fifty of them for yachts over twenty-five metres. It is the charter capital of the country: the Yacht Charter Village along the quay holds the offices of the fleets, and the bareboats and crewed yachts of a Greek summer set out from here. A yacht lies among a thousand others.

  4. Piraeus

    Piraeus is the great port of Greece and the gate to its islands — the chief harbour of the country, among the busiest passenger ports in Europe, four million travellers and the ferries of the whole Aegean through it in a year. A yacht wants none of the commercial quays; but Mikrolimano beside them — Munichia of the ancients — is the little round harbour lined with the seafood tavernas that look on the boats.

Mythology

  1. Poseidon

    On the Acropolis, Pausanias saw a mark said to have been made by Poseidon’s trident and a cistern of sea water inside the Erechtheum that sounded like waves when a south wind blew. The Acropolis Museum holds fragments attributed to Poseidon from the Parthenon’s west pediment, which showed his contest with Athena.

  2. Demeter

    At Eleusis, Demeter sits beside the Maiden Well, enters the house of Celeus and orders a temple built above Callichorus. The sanctuary later became the setting of the Eleusinian Mysteries, whose secrecy echoes the hymn’s refusal to disclose the rites.

  3. Athena

    Athens traced its name and divine patronage to Athena’s victory over Poseidon on the Acropolis. The Parthenon’s west pediment represented their contest, and fragments of its colossal Athena are held by the Acropolis Museum.

  4. Ares

    The Areopagus received its mythical name from the trial at which twelve gods acquitted Ares of killing his daughter’s attacker. The temple later dedicated to him in the Agora was an older building of Athena transferred from Pallene during the Roman period.

  5. Aeschylus

    The Oresteia won first prize when it was presented at Athens's festival of Dionysus in 458 BC. In Eumenides, Athena appoints Athenian citizens to judge Orestes on the Hill of Ares, establishes the tribunal for bloodshed and gives the Erinyes honours and a home in the city.

  6. Boreas

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

  7. Daedalus

    Athens is where Daedalus's myth turns: Apollodorus and Diodorus both give him Athenian birth, both put his trial for killing his sister's son before the court of the Areopagus, and both make the verdict there the reason he leaves Greece for Crete. Diodorus adds that he first went to ground in a deme of Attica before leaving the country for good.

  8. Eileithyia

    Eileithyia’s Athenian temple contained three fully draped wooden images. Local women told Pausanias that two were Cretan dedications and the oldest had come from Delos, placing both rival origins in one sanctuary.

  9. Eros

    Pausanias saw an altar to Eros before the Academy and another inside Athens dedicated to Anteros. The second commemorated the tragic story of Timagoras and Meles, turning rejected desire into a cult of love answered or avenged.

  10. Euripides

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

  11. Hebe

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

  12. Iphigenia

    Euripides has Athena appoint Iphigenia priestess of Artemis at Brauron and assign her a burial there. Pausanias records the local claim that Iphigenia brought the Taurian image to Brauron, while doubting that the image shown was the original.

  13. Nemesis

    At Rhamnous in Attica, Nemesis had a sanctuary and a marble cult statue described by Pausanias. The goddess was linked there with the punishment of the Persian force defeated at nearby Marathon.

  14. Nike

    The Temple of Athena Nike stands on a bastion beside the Acropolis gateway and honours Athena as the giver of victory. The Classical building replaced an earlier shrine and has been dismantled and reconstructed repeatedly since its stones were reused in fortifications in 1686.

  15. Orestes

    Aeschylus brings Orestes to the Areopagus, where Athena establishes a court to hear the Erinyes’ case against him. Pausanias later records a sanctuary of the goddesses beside the hill.

  16. Persephone

    Near Eleusis, Pausanias records a place called Erineus where Hades was said to descend with Persephone after the abduction. Within the sanctuary, a separate Plutoneion joined the underworld ruler to the rites centred on Demeter and her daughter.

  17. Prometheus

    Prometheus had an altar in the Academy at Athens from which runners carried burning torches towards the city. Pausanias says victory depended on preserving the flame; if every torch failed, the race had no winner.

  18. Sophocles

    Plutarch places Sophocles's first dramatic victory in the Athenian contest, where Cimon and the other nine generals judged him against Aeschylus. Oedipus at Colonus was produced posthumously at Athens in 401 BC and makes Attic ground, Theseus's protection and the guarded location of Oedipus's tomb determine its ending.

  19. The Amazonomachy

    Athens fixed the Amazonomachy to the Areopagus and repeated the battle across the Parthenon’s fourteen west metopes. The Acropolis Museum holds four of those metopes, while nine remain on the temple.

  20. The Amphiareion at Oropos

    The Amphiareion at Oropos in Attica was the oracle where consultants 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 cast silver or gold.

  21. The Anemoi

    In the Roman Agora of Athens, the octagonal Horologion of Andronikos carries relief personifications of eight winds, each aligned to a direction and identified with its own symbols. Sundials, a weather vane and a water-powered mechanism made the winds part of a working instrument.

  22. The Centaurs

    The Parthenon's south metopes, carved 445-440 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 contest still undecided in the stone.

  23. 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 oldest sanctuary of the god and where he saw two temples and two statues, one of them the ivory and gold work of Alcamenes. The theatre stands upslope from it, and the Acropolis Museum, which holds the finds, dates the sanctuary to after the middle of the sixth century BC and puts the auditorium in its final form at 16,000 seats.

  24. The Dioscuri

    Pausanias records an ancient Athenian sanctuary of the Dioscuri below the enclosure of Aglaurus, with standing images of the twins, their sons on horseback and paintings by Polygnotus and Micon.

  25. The Eleusinian Mysteries

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

  26. The Erinyes

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

  27. The Gigantomachy

    The Parthenon's east metopes, carved in the 440s BC and held today in the Acropolis Museum, set the Gigantomachy over the temple's main entrance 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 Panathenaea.

  28. The Panathenaia

    Pausanias saw the ship built for the procession of the Panathenaea standing near the Hill of Ares at Athens, and thought it beaten for size only by the nine-banked vessel at Delos. 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.

  29. The Ploutonion at Eleusis

    Inside the sanctuary at Eleusis, west of the Lesser Propylaea, two shallow caves and the foundations of successive temples formed a precinct of Pluto. Reliefs of Pluto and Persephone identify the place, while its excavators leave the precise use of the caves and pits unresolved.

  30. 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.

  31. Theseus

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