The congested, sprawling, and polluted appearance of Athens today
can’t hide the fact that it was once the center of Western culture. The
world-class sights located here are a testament to the city’s history as
the seat of European civilization, and they mustn’t be missed.
Athens’s top sights
The Acropolis and the ParthenonLocated right in the heart of Athens, the Acropolis Hill is where, mythology
tells us, the gods Athena and Poseidon squared off to see who could
take better care of the local citizens and thus become the city’s guardian
and namesake. (Poseidon produced a saltwater spring from the ground;
Athena topped him by inventing the versatile olive tree.)
The Acropolis is part of Greece’s identity, a landmark that symbolizes the
country itself. At the top rests the mighty Parthenon, a temple that rises
nobly above Athens, reminding the modern city of its ancient heritage.
Allow a good two to three hours to tour the Acropolis and its museum.
You enter by climbing stairs to the Beulé Gate, built by the Roman Emperor
Valerian in A.D. 267. The cute little Ionic temple of Athena Nike (built 424
B.C., rebuilt A.D. 1940) is perched on your right as you climb.
The world has bigger and better-preserved ancient shrines, but the
Parthenon still remains the poster child of Greek temples. Between 447
and 438 B.C., the Athenians spent lavishly to build this shrine to their
patron. A 40-foot statue of Athena (a small Roman copy of it is in the
National Archaeological Museum) once graced this all-marble temple. The
structure is perfectly proportioned, and a few architectural tricks make it
appear flawless to the naked eye. To compensate for the eye’s natural tendency
to create illusions, the horizontal surfaces are bowed slightly
upward in the middle to appear perfectly level, the columns lean slightly
inward to appear parallel, and each is thicker in the middle so it looks like
a textbook cylinder to you and me.
The Parthenon remained virtually intact through the Middle Ages. It
became an Orthodox church in the sixth century, a Catholic church during
the Crusades, and an Islamic mosque when the Turks occupied the region.
But its luck ran out when the Venetians attacked the Turkish city in 1687.
The Turks stored ammunition in the old temple, and when a Venetian cannonball
hit the stockpile, the armaments exploded and blew the Parthenon
to pieces.
Although the temple was once covered almost entirely with sculptures and
ornamental carvings, only a few sculptured spots remain on the Parthenon
today. British Lord Elgin collected almost all the other sculpted friezes and
pediment pieces from the rubble — destroying many in the process — and
shipped them to England from 1801 to 1811. These bits of the original
Parthenon remain in the British Museum, even though the Greek government
has asked for their return many times. British officials have repeatedly
refused, citing Athens’s lack of a suitable museum in which to display
the marbles. In response, Athens has begun to construct such a museum
at the foot of the Acropolis. Although the hope was that it would be completed
in time for the Olympics (and the Greeks could use the international
attention to once again pressure the Brits), the structure is, as of this writing,
still just a construction site.
If you look down the Acropolis’s south side, you see the half-moon shapes
of two theaters. The huge one to the east that is mostly in ruins is the
Theater of Dionysus, built in 330 B.C. (entrance on Dionyssíous
Aeropayítou; %010-322-4625). Near the entrance to the Acropolis lies the
Odeum of Heródes Átticus, which was built in A.D. 174 and restored in
recent centuries to stage concerts during the Athens Festival from June to
October (for information, call the festival office at %010-322-1459 or the
Odeum at %010-323-2771).
The 12€ ($14) admission ticket is valid for seven days and includes admission
to the Acropolis, the Acropolis Museum, the Ancient Agora, the
Theater of Dionysus, the Temple of Olympian Zeus, and the Karameikos
Cemetery as well as the Roman Forum and the Tower of the Winds. It is
still possible for visitors to buy individual tickets at sights other than the
Acropolis.
See map p. 539. The Acropolis entrance is on the west side of the hill and can be
reached from a path off Dioskoúon and Theorías streets. % 210-321-0219; 010-
323-6665 for the museum. Metro: Acropolis. Bus/trolley: A2, A2e, A3, 1, 5, 9, 15, 40, 57,
110, 126, or 230. Admission: 12€ ($14) ; free first Sun of the months Oct–June and
every Sun Nov–Mar. Acropolis open: Summer, Tues–Sun 8 a.m.–7 p.m., Mon noon to
7 p.m.; winter, daily 8:30 a.m.–2:30 p.m.; closed occasionally in the early afternoon.
Acropolis Museum open: Mon 11 a.m.–7 p.m., Tues– Sun 8 a.m.– 7 p.m. Call the Greek
National Tourism Organization (%210-331-0437) for details and precise hours
forthis year.
The Ancient Agora (Market)
The everyday life of ancient Athenians revolved around the Agora, or marketplace.
But like the Forum in Rome, not much is left of the historic
market today; it appears as little more than a dusty bowl filled with mangy
trees, broken-down pediments among the grass, and rows of broken
column stubs marking the borders of temples and buildings from a bygone
era. Still, the Agora takes a good two hours to sift through the rubble and
study the reconstructed bits — longer for real students of history.
The Hephaisteion, built between 449 and 444 B.C. (and one of the world’s
best-preserved Greek temples), and the reconstructed Stoa of Attalos are
the two most remarkable remains. A stoa was a series of columns spaced
evenly apart supporting a long roof under which shopkeepers set up business,
people met, and philosophers held court in the shade. One famous
thinker named Zeno held classes under a stoa so often that his disciples
were known as the Stoics.
The Agora’s interesting museum is in the huge Stoa of Attalos, which was
built in the second century B.C. and rebuilt in the 1950s. In many ways, the
Agora is a museum of modern democracy; the most fascinating artifacts
document systems the ancients used to carry out their famous democratic
processes. For example, you can see bronze jury ballots — jurors voted
with a bronze wheel with a solid axle if they felt the man on trial was innocent,
with an empty axle if they found the defendant’s story as hollow as
the rod.
The museum also has a marble kleroterion (allotment machine) that looks
very much like a modern lotto machine. Bronze tickets bearing the names
of government officials were inserted into slots, and colored balls would
fall from a tube and randomly determine who among those names would
fulfill various civic duties, such as serving on a committee.
The museum also has a collection of pottery shards called óstraka, on
which, once a year, Athenians could write the name of any man they
thought had gained too much power and, thus, threatened the democracy.
If any person’s name appeared on the majority of óstraka, he would be
ostracized, or banished, from Athens for ten years. (And now you know
where the term came from.)
See map p. 539. The entrance to the Ancient Agora is on Andrianou Street at Ayiou
Philippou Square, just east of Monastiráki Square and below the Acropolis. Metro:
Thiseio or Monastiráki. Bus/trolley: 35 or 731. %210-321-0185. Admission: 4€($4.60)
adults. Open: Daily 8:30 a.m.–7:30 p.m.
