Athens travel guide

Top 10 sights in Athens

Ranked by Wikipedia language editions — proven fame.

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   1© Steve Swayne · CC BY 2.0

   Parthenon

   Built between 447 and 432 BC as the treasury of an empire dressed as a temple, and standing largely intact until 1687, when a Venetian shell hit the powder the Ottomans were storing in it. Most of its surviving sculpture is in London, which remains the central dispute in Greek cultural politics.

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2. 

   2© A.Savin · CC BY-SA 3.0

   Acropolis of Athens

   The citadel above the city, holding the Parthenon, the Erechtheion, the Propylaea and the little temple of Athena Nike. Around three million people a year now come up, so entry is by timed slot, and the first hour after opening is the only cool one in summer.

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   Platonic Academy

   The school Plato founded around 387 BC in an olive grove outside the walls, and which taught for nine hundred years until Justinian closed it in AD 529. The site is now a quiet park in a residential district, with low foundations and almost no visitors.

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   4© Christophe Meneboeuf · CC BY-SA 3.0

   Classical Athens

   The city-state of the fifth and fourth centuries BC, which invented and then lost a form of democracy restricted to perhaps thirty to sixty thousand adult male citizens out of a much larger population of women, foreigners and slaves.

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   5© Chepry 💬 (Andrzej Barabasz) 📷 🇵🇱 · CC BY-SA 4.0

   Erechtheion

   A temple of the 410s BC on the north side of the Acropolis, built on uneven sacred ground and so laid out on several levels. Its south porch is carried by six draped women; the ones there now are copies, five originals being in the Acropolis Museum and one in London.

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6. 

   6© Bgabel · CC BY-SA 3.0

   Panathenaic Stadium

   A stadium cut into a hillside in the fourth century BC and rebuilt entirely in Pentelic marble for the first modern Olympics in 1896 — the only stadium in the world made of marble. The modern Athens marathon still finishes on its track.

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7. 

   7© Sp!ros · CC BY-SA 4.0

   Daphni Monastery

   An eleventh-century monastery eleven kilometres northwest of the centre, World Heritage for its mosaics — among the finest of the middle Byzantine period, on a gold ground under the dome. The 1999 earthquake damaged the building and access has been limited ever since.

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   Temple of Athena Nike

   The smallest building on the Acropolis, an Ionic temple of the 420s BC on the bastion beside the entrance, to Athena as bringer of victory. It has been taken apart and put back together three times, most recently in the 1930s and again after 2000.

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9. 

   9© Tomisti · CC BY-SA 3.0

   Lyceum

   The precinct where Aristotle taught from 335 BC, walking as he lectured, which is why his followers were called the Peripatetics. Its remains were found in 1996 during work for a new museum and the site is now open in the middle of the diplomatic quarter.

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10. 

    10© Thomas Wolf, www.foto-tw.de · CC BY-SA 3.0 de

    National Archaeological Museum of Athens

    The greatest collection of Greek antiquity anywhere: the gold from Mycenae including the mask Schliemann wrongly called Agamemnon's, the bronze Poseidon from Cape Artemision, and the Antikythera mechanism, a geared astronomical calculator from about 100 BC that nothing else matched for a millennium and a half.

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Popular tickets & tours in Athens

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1. 

   1© Cdv1014 · CC BY-SA 4.0

   Athena Parthenos

   The twelve-metre statue of gold and ivory that Phidias made for the Parthenon and which vanished in antiquity, probably melted for the metal. What it looked like is known from Roman copies, the best of them a small marble version in the National Archaeological Museum.

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   2© https://www.flickr.com/people/jonezes/ · CC BY-SA 2.0

   Ancient Agora of Athens

   The market and civic centre of ancient Athens, in use from the sixth century BC. Socrates argued here and Saint Paul preached; the Stoa of Attalos was rebuilt in the 1950s.

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3. 

   3© Ava Βabili · CC BY-SA 4.0

   Temple of Olympian Zeus

   A temple begun in the sixth century BC and finished by Hadrian in AD 131, six and a half centuries later. It had a hundred and four columns of seventeen metres; fifteen still stand, and a sixteenth lies where a gale dropped it in 1852, its drums scattered like coins.

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   4© Dennis G. Jarvis · CC BY-SA 2.0

   Temple of Hephaestus

   The best-preserved Greek temple anywhere, a Doric building of the 5th century BC on the low hill above the Agora. Its survival owes much to long use as the Orthodox church of Saint George, which continued until 1834.

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   Odeon of Herodes Atticus

   A stone theatre of AD 161 built by Herodes Atticus in memory of his wife, restored in 1950 and holding five thousand. The Athens Festival uses it through the summer, so it is the one ancient monument here you can sit in for an evening rather than walk past.

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   Theatre of Dionysus

   The theatre on the south slope of the Acropolis where the plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides and Aristophanes were first performed, in competition, at the festival of Dionysus. It seated something like seventeen thousand, and the marble thrones for priests survive at the front.

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   7© Yair-haklai · CC BY-SA 4.0

   Acropolis Museum

   Bernard Tschumi's museum of 2009, built on stilts over an excavated quarter of the ancient city, which is visible through glass floors. Its top gallery reassembles the Parthenon frieze at eye level, with plaster casts standing in for the pieces held in London — an argument made in architecture.

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   Tower of the Winds

   An octagonal marble tower of the second or first century BC in the Roman Agora, with a relief of a wind god on each face. It held sundials outside and a water clock within, and its form was copied all over Georgian Britain by architects who had read about it.

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   9© A.Savin · CC BY-SA 3.0

   Old Royal Palace

   Built in 1843 as the palace of Otto, the first king of modern Greece, and the building from whose balcony the constitution was granted after the rising of that September — which is why the square outside is called Syntagma. It has housed the Greek parliament since 1934.

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    10© C messier · CC BY-SA 4.0

    Syntagma Square

    The central square, named after the constitution that Otto was forced to grant in 1843 and which he read out from the balcony of what is now parliament. The guard at the tomb of the unknown soldier changes hourly, and the metro station below it is a small museum of what was dug up building it.

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