Athens - the ancient sites ...

Broad panorama from Lybetticus Hill, across the Athens Agora to the Acropolis. This view is from the hill of the Temple of Hephaestus. [9299]

The ancient sites in Athens can be visited by the purchase of EUR30 package tickets which, weirdly, allow once only entries to multiple sites over five days. Tickets to each site can be bought individually for EUR10 or less, and, confusingly, the package tickets are only available at some outlets. To allay our confusion and for maximum convenience, we just bought the package tickets. Online purchases are encouraged, but we found it easy and quick to buy them at the main kiosk at the Acropolis, avoiding, of course, the early morning queues. We managed to use our passes to visit most of them.

Hadrian's Library as seen from The Dolli hotel. [6556]

The Acropolis is, of course, the highlight of Athens, and was crowded throughout its opening hours, visibly moreso when, we think, cruise ships were in Pireaus. On his 7:30am walks, Mike estimated queues several hundred long waiting to buy tickets and enter the site which opened at 08:00. We're not sure that "go early" advice was good information, because later in the day, say after lunch, the queues drop to zero. Maybe the early birds are trying to avoid the heat of the afternoons? "Acropolis" merely means highest point in the city, and so there are many hills with that name in Greece. The Athens version is a flat topped rocky hill with at about 150m above sea level and 3ha in area, and it's not even the highest point in the city.

At the top of the entrance path to the Acropolis, part of the Monument of Agrippa, in honour of the son-in-law of Roman Emperor Octavian Augustus. [9174]

Detail of the Parthenon, after earthquakes, explosions and looters. [9212]

These female sculptures at the Erechtheion, the Porch of the Caryatids, on the Acropolis, represent virgins from the Laconic city of Karyes. The building contained a sacred olive tree planted by Athena. The statues are replicas, the originals survive at the Acropolis Museum, except for one stolen by Lord Elgin around 1800. [9218]

The most important thing you can do on a visit to the Acropolis is get a selfie, even when you are chanelling Athena. [9225]

Like many large cultural sites, the Acropolis has a long and chequered history. Somehere around 1300BC a 750m circumference Cyclopean wall was built to protect a bronze age Mycenaean Greece palace. That wall still stands, but there seems to be little left of another wall built 5-600 years later around the base of the Acropolis to enlarge the defended area and the protect water supplies. There was a lot of temple building on the top of the hill in the 500's BC and afterwards, some on top of previous constructions, but of course the most famous is the Parthenon, ruins easily visible from The Dolli. It was built by Greek politician and military general Pericles in celebration of victory in a series of wars with Persia and heralded the "Golden Age of Athens" (460-430BC), a not very long period of time. Many friezes from and on the Parthenon depict heroic scenes of battle with the Persians.

The best view of Athens can be seen from this north-eastern corner of the Acropolis. [6612]

Propylaia, the grand entrance, between the Monument to Agrippa on the left, and the Athena Nike Temple on the right was the culmination of the only reasonable accerss to the Acropolis plateau, but it was never finished. [9238]

Short of attending an opera there, the Odeon of Herodes Atticus, 161AD, can be best seen from the Acropolis. This theatre was built by Atticus in memory of this wife and was a 5,000 stone-benched seat venue for concerts, at least until the Heruli arrived in 267AD. After being renovated in the 1950's, without its wooden roof, it now hosts concerts and events again. Concert-goers probably bring cushions.

With the city stretching into the distance, the Odeon of Herodes Atticus is now used for major events in Athens. [9169]

A remaining fragment of the Odeon of Herodes Atticus. [6687]

The bald hill of Areopagus as seen from the higher vantage point of the Acropolis. [9227]

The Temple of Olympian Zeus, known as Olympieion is a huge 104 column temple dedicated to Zeus reflecting his "olympian" position amongst the other gods. Construction started ~500m south-east of the Acropolis in 6thC BC but took an eternity to finish. Finally Hadrian wrapped it up in 2ndC AD, but it only lasted a century until our friends, the Heruli, came along.

Two lonely columns from the 104 that once comprised the Temple of Olympian Zeus. [8130]

What remains of the mosaic floor in a 2ndC AD building called House of the Roman Mosaic by ASCSA. [9250]

The Library of Hadrian was built in ~130AD by the eponymous Roman Emperor who had a grand plan to rebuild the city of Athens. It stored not only books but also state archives and housed schools of learning and philosophy. The library was seriously damaged in 267AD during the barbaric invasion by the Germanic or Gothic Heruli, then renovated in ~410AD by Herculius. Over the next four hundred years, Christian churches were built in the library's courtyard and destroyed, most notably the Tetraconch Church (four apses, 5thC AD), a three aisled basilica (7thC AD), the single aisled Mengali Panagia (12thC AD). The Ottoman empire saw the library put to various administrative, commercial, military, incarceration and religious uses. The present restoration of the site mostly in the 20th Century. [ https://www.worldhistory.org/article/839/the-library-of-hadrian-athens/ ]

Imposing wall of the Library of Hadrian as seen from near Monastiraki metro station. [9347]

Some of the ruins near the Tetraconch Church in the Library of Hadrian. [9340]

From the Tetraconch Church to the 17thC AD Fethiye Mosque, now a museum. [9341]

At the Tetraconch Church in the Library of Hadrian. [6652]

A wall fragment at the back of Athens' Hadrian's Library site. [6618]

Ruins of the tetraconch church in the Library of Hadrian. [6622]

The Ancient Agora of Athens is a large site now partly bisected by a metro line and a street of cafes, just north-west of the Acropolis. It features ruins of many notable buildings including the Temple of Hephaestus is a largely intact building on a hill, and the Stoa of Attalos, ~150BC, destroyed by the Heruli, now reconstructed in all its glory and now the site of the Museum of The Ancient Agora. The 115m long Stoa was reconstructed in the 1950's by the American School of Classical Studies at Athens (ASCSA), first founded in 1881 by a consortium of nine American universities, and it's a magnificent building! The museum is on the first floor and is mainly concerned with Athenian democracy, but also features a wide variety of artifacts. Attalos II was the ruler of a nearby Greek city. [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Agora_of_Athens ]

The reconstructed Stoa of Attalos as seen from Areopagus Hill. [6860]

Along the restored colonnade of the Stoa of Attalos in the Ancient Agora. [9259]

Thanks to the American School of Classical Studies at Athens for restorting the Stoa of Attalos to its former glory, in the 1950's. [9281]

The Temple of Hephaestus and part of the Ancient Agora as seen from Areopagus Hill. [6863]

The impressively intact Temple of Hephaestus has survived history better than most buildings from ancient Athens. [6658]

Detail of the more or less intact Temple of Hephaestus in the Ancient Agora. [9321]

The Temple of Hephaestus in Athens' Ancient Agora, the only intact ancient building on the site. [9324]

Rather newer than the ancient Greek ruins in the Ancient Agora, but in better shape than most of them, is the Byzantine Church of the Holy Apostles, 10thC AD, built over the top of a Nymphaion[9282]

Near Monastiraki Metro Station and north of Adrianou street, there was an active "dig" underway throughout our several visits to Athens, and we could observe it through a chainlink fence. The site was the north-west corner of the Athenian Agora with the excavations undertaken by ASCSA. The School has been researching here since 1931, and the workers we saw at the site, studying archaeology, were students volunteering from anywhere in the world who are accommodated in Athens at no cost. The current dig is in and around shops and a building called Stoa Poikile ("Painted Stoa", from 465BC), a stoa being a long colonnaded building, this one popular as a "hangout" that attracted large crowds. By ~1300AD, all this had been built over by new houses and shops. We don't know how this part or any other has since come to be exposed for archaelogical excavation. A mounted map of the dig site showed features and layouts we could barely recognise on the ground, including the Eridanos River of which there was no sign, well down probably.

Part of ASCSA's current dig site in the Athenian Agora. [6871]

At 7:30am, at least there is some shade for the archeologists at the Athens Agora. [9118]

Archaeologist at work in the Ancient Greek Agora. [6717]

Hot sun and not much shade to protect these volunteers working the Athenian Agora site. [6875]

A metro train bowls past the Stoa of Attalos. Construction of Line 1 apparently destroyed a basilica next to the stoa. [6719]

The Roman Agora was built near the ancient Greek agora during the reign of Augustus to fulfil a promise made by Julius Caesar in 51BC. Its main feature is the octagonal Tower of the Winds, ~50BC, made in Pentelic marble. Eight large reliefs to wind gods decorate the top. Each of the wind gods have names. The building seems to have served as a clocktower - it featured sundials on every face, and a water clock inside driven by a spring from the Acropolis hill. The ancient Greeks divided daytime into twelve hours, so summer hours would have been longer than winter hours. [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tower_of_the_Winds ]

The Tower of the Winds in the Roman Agora. The gods visible are Boreas, the cold north wind and Sciron, a dry north west wind. [6627]

Athens - Museums old and new ...

Athens has many museums. The two we gave most attention to were the Acropolis Museum and the National Archaelogical Museum because those encapsulate what makes Athens and Greece really important in world history. Between them, they house an unparalleled collection of archaelogical artifacts ranging from prehistory to late antiquity, and almost all of them were collected from places within a 250km radius.

The imposing main entry to the Acropolis Museum. The Weiler Building, left, is the museum's research centre. [6841]

The Acropolis Museum (A.M.) understandably focuses on archeological matter from the Acropolis. The current building, just south of its namesake, is new, having been opened in 2009, the old museum was on the hill. The new A.M. is a beautiful concrete and glass edifice, rather uncharacteristic of most of Athens, with its main entrance facing the Acropolis. It stands beside the Akropoli metro station, but its an easy walk there from The Dolli, less than a kilometer. The design of the museum is so as to replicate many features of Parthenon. For example: "the spacing of the columns of the Parthenon hall is the same as that of the ancient temple and the use of glass walls on all four exterior walls allows the natural light to illuminate the Parthenon marbles as they do on the ancient temple . . . the pediments, metopes* and frieze are displayed facing outwards, as they did on Parthenon Wikipedia. Looking out of the museum to the north provides an easy view of the Parthenon, only 280m away.[ A metope is a square space between triglyphs in a Doric frieze. ]

Looking towards the Acropolis from the A.M. [6826]

The collection at the A.M. is collectively stunning with statuary and friezes that the British didn't manage to steal early in the 19th Century on display in a spacious and magnificent setting over multiple floors and with excellent interpretative signage in Greek and English. QR codes open audio interpretations of the various exhibits. It would take a long time to absorb everything this magnificent museum has to offer. We only spent three hours there, but in that time we noted that the emphasis is on the artwork and not so much on the culture which produced it. The A.M. replaced a 1874 museum atop the Acropolis, vastly inadequate for the volume of antiquities found on the site, even after a 1950's expansion.

Impressive and crowded entry to the exhibitions at the Acropolis Museum. [6807]

Herakles (son of Zeus and Alkmene) fighting the sea demon Triton (son of Posiedon and Amphrite) , 570BC, reconstructed fragments of a limestone sculpture found near the Parthenon in 1882. [6809]

Model of the Acropolis from the south, at some point in time. The Odeum of Herodes Atticus is the theatre on the left. [6812]

Showing how fragments of a statue are reassembled to give a better idea of the whole original. [6818]

Tiny fraction of the frieze on the Parthenon. [6822]

Tiny fraction of the frieze on the Parthenon. [6828]

Once the crown on the ridge of the Parthenon pediment, this amazing 4m tall ornament has been reconstructed (1990) in plaster with but a few original fragments. [6830]

Most interestingly (and controversially), the A.M. has been built over the top of multiple layers of ancient Roman and Byzantine villages, featuring closely packed "modest, private roadside houses and workshops" [ Wikipedia ]. A map of the ancient neighbourhood dates layers of houses from 5thC AD through to 8thC AD, a span of 1300 years, and shows "streets, residences, workshops and tombs". The village, now referred to as the Makrygiannis Plot, extends way beyond the bounds of the A.M., and excavated parts of it were removed to make way for the next-door Akropoli metro station. The museum is built on pillars, so you can wander through these excavations below the museum. The pillars are positioned to minimise damage to the excavations. Sections of the ground floor of the A.M. have glass floors so these excavations can be seen. Rather by grand coincidence, we visited the museum on 26 June, apparently the very day that the excavations part of the museum was first opened. Usually, we don't manage such luck.

The massive basement excavations underneath the Acropolis Museum. [6835]

Tiny part of the excavated houses underneath the Acropolis Museum. [6805]

A water cistern in a courtyard of a private house excavated and now underneath the Acropolis Museum. [6837]

Evidence of intricate plumbing, thousands of years old, in the village now under the Acropolis Museum. [6838]

We had heard that queues were long to visit the A.M, so we had prepared ourselves for a long wait. It didn't happen. There was a long queue, but that turned out to be a large tour group (big enough to be off a cruise ship) awaiting bulk admission. No signage to help, and no facilitators outside the building, we bypassed that group and found that the "walk-ins" ticketing area was queue-less, and we went straight in. Don't rely on helpful signage in Athens! After our visit, we bought cool drinks from a part open-air cafe in the museum. Table service was good, but it was windy and light-weight things like napkins were blowing around everywhere.

Entrance to the Acropolis Museum. Luckily, we discovered that we could bypass that queue. [6806]

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The splendid neo-classical National Archaelogical Museum (N.A.M.) building in Exarcheion was completed in 1889, and it is presently enjoying an underground extension which is due to open in 2028. The N.A.M. features exhibits from all over Greece, from neolithic times with a possible emphasis on the Classical period around 400BC. According to the Greek Ministry of Culture and Sports, it is "one of the world's great museums" (http://odysseus.culture.gr/h/1/eh151.jsp?obj_id=3249), and we believe it. It's divided into logical sections, including Santorini where frescos from Akroteri (see our previous blog) are exhibited. It was to see these that mostly prompted our visit to the N.A.M., and we were not disappointed.

The magnificent facade of the National Archaeological Museum. [9125]

Large exhibition hall in the National Archaeological Museum in Athens. [9153]

The frescos are splendid, and they have been mounted as they were arranged in the excavations at Akroteri. Their almost perfect preservation is attributed to their burial in volcanic ash. Colouration was sophisticated, using mineral oxides of iron for red, yellow ochre, copper pyrites, alumino silicates (lime) for blue. The boxing children fresco depicts two naked boys with shaved heads wearing belts and boxing gloves. Found in the same room was the antelopes fresco of which there were several.

Reconstruction of a room from Akroteri, the boxing children and antelopes frescos. [9137]

Gilded bronze weapon. [9128]

In ancient Greek scuptures, warriors are depicted naked but that's probably not how they appeared in battle. [9130]

Pottery from 5thC BC depicting chariot racing. [9151]

The N.A.M. bronze statuary collection includes this one from the Classical Period (5-4thC BC). It's fantastic that such old and fragile artworks have survived, even if armless. [9154]

In the basement cafe of the National Archaeological Museum, this mozaic floor from Piraeus (100's AD), depicting mythical Medusa with snakes for hair. Medusa was thought to repel evil. [9156]

Gold elliptical funeral crowns from 'Grave Circle A', a 16thC BC bronze age cemetery in Mycenae, in the N.A.M's prehistoric collection. [9160]

A garden of famous men in the National Archaeological Museum. [9164]

Three gods sculpted in Parian marble (100BC) and found on Delos, goat-footed Pan is making sexual advances on Aphrodite who is defending herself with a sandal with the winged Eros coming to her aid. [9165]

Larger than life Poseidon, god of the sea but missing his trident, statue in Parian marble found on Milos (about 100BC). [9167]

It was a hellishly hot day for our visit to the N.A.M., so we caught the Metro even though it's less than 2km from The Dolli. We were suffering after our visit and taxi'd home, and this became a very disappointing experience. The driver of the only taxi in sight was a crook, did not use a meter and overcharged us multiple times over. If we weren't so overcome with exhaustion, we might/should have photographed the driver, his credentials and the cab's license plate. Not great harm done in the end, but this one taxi driver has left us with a very sour taste in our mouths, and has blighted our fond memories of Athens.

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What is missing from Athens museums are the Elgin Marbles, a collection of ancient Greek statues "stolen" by one Thomas Bruce, the 7th Earl of Elgin, between 1801 and 1812. Both museums give ample coverage to the story of the Marbles with varying degrees of "politeness". Elgin's Marbles were from the Acropolis, mostly the Partenon, mostly 5th Centure BC sculptures (in marble). Fortunately, Elgin's collection has been well kept in the British Museum, but the story of how they got removed is the subject of long-standing controversy. It is briefly this...

From later ancient times, the Parthenon was already in bad shape due to earthquakes. During one Ottoman-Venetian war (1680's), the occupying Turks unwisely stored gunpowder in the Parthenon, and it was blown up during a Venetian artilliary attack from the adjacent Philopappus Hill. Apart from hundreds of fatalities, most sculptures fell from the various buildings on the Acropolis and were scavenged and looted for 150 years. Around 1801, when Elgin was Britain's ambassador to Turkey, he (without approval) removed sculptures and shipped them at first to Malta later to Britain. Later, an expensive divorce forced Elgin to sell the Marbles to the British government. The proceeds were less than half his sunk costs, but he did show some integrity by declining higher offers including from Napoleon. Elgin would later claim that his removal of the Marbles had been approved by the Sultan, but there was no evidence of that, and many believe he merely paid off local officials. Greece won its independence from the Ottoman Empire in 1830. From 1835 to the present day, Greece has actively sought the return of the Marbles, but to no avail despite wide international support.

The removal of a metope from the Parthenon by Lord Elgin's men. Watercolour 1801 exhibited in the Stoa of Atalos in the Agora Museum. [9275]

We would have liked also to visit the National Historical Museum (est. 1882), located in Syntagma in the old Parliament House having moved there in 1960 from what used to be the "House of Poor Girls" amongst other temporary addresses. This museum, true to its name, focuses on history more than artifacts, and mostly covers the modern period from Ottoman and the wars to achieve independence. We got to the front door on a walk from the Monument to the Unknown Solider, but it was closed at the time, and we never came back. Laziness maybe, but we decided that relaxation in the stifling weather was more important, at the time. https://www.nhmuseum.gr/en/about-us/the-national-historical-museum

Athens' National Historical Museum near Syntagma Square. [0125]

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Greece did not make it into Euro 2024 (the UEFA European Football Championship), having been defeated by Georgia in the preliminaries. But that hadn't diminished national interest in this soccer event. On our first stay in Athens, we found people watching it everywhere on their phones, and restaurants had TVs placed so they can show it live to patrons who were enthusiastic fans. When looking for the entrance to the Acropolis Museum, the security guard we asked for directions was engrossed in a Euro 2024 game, and was bemused when we admitted that we didn't have a favourite team in the competition.

As an aside, we had wondered why so many Greek names end in "os". Just look at the island names in the Cyclades, and the cafe names anywhere. An AI query said that those names "reflects historical linguistic connections and cultural practices", specifically that "...os" implies masculinity in Proto-Indo-European linguistics, and for example, "...poulos" means "son of".