Τρεις μέρες στην Αθήνα (Three Days in Athens)

I had read and heard mixed reviews about Athens, with the main complaints being that it's dingy and crowded and that there isn't much to the city after you've seen the Acropolis. However, other travelers rave about the city and list it as a favourite destination in Europe. For me, it looked like a good budget traveler's trip with warm weather and a chance to see one of Europe's most famous landmarks. So I figured I'd go and decide for myself whether the city is a great travel destination.

It turns out late October is a great time to go because the weather is milder than during its blazing summers but still warm enough to provide a laidback Mediterranean atmosphere. Temperatures during the three days were around 26°C and moderately humid, which was a nice change from Paris (6°C and raining when I left).

Normally I would have booked Athens for a weekend stay, but for some reason airfares on Sunday evening were very expensive, such that it was much cheaper to stay a third day and fly out on a Monday. Worried that I'd be bored with three days in the city, I planned two excursions, which would also give me a chance to see other parts of Greece.

Day 1

I started the first day by heading straight for the most famous site in the city, the Acropolis of Athens. The site contains several ancient buildings, including the iconic Parthenon as well as the Propylaea and the Erechtheum. The bonus is that the Acropolis is the highest point in the city, so you can get a great view of Athens in every direction. From this vantage point, the city sprawls towards every mountain in the area (and is even starting to develop onto some mountains) and has a bright white appearance. The white appearance belies the city seen up close: a lot of buildings are old and rundown, and there is a lot of graffiti in non-tourist areas, so some parts of Athens do have a slummy look.


At the Acropolis of Athens, a picture of me behind the Parthenon. The front of the Parthenon was covered with scaffolding.

My ticket to the Acropolis also gave me access to several other sites in the area that I visited, including the Theater of Dionysus (in which you can sit), the Ancient Agora, and the Temple of Olympian Zeus (although the Acropolis Museum requires another ticket). 



The Museum of the Ancient Agora is housed in a beautifully rebuilt version of the Stoa of Attalos. The museum is small and most of its exhibits are pottery or weathered marble statues, but one of the more interesting items is a very large bronze Spartan shield from 425 B.C.

Most of the structures in the Ancient Agora of Athens are heavily weathered ruins, but the Temple of Hepaestus is one of the best preserved temples from Ancient Greece. It was even used as a Greek Orthodox church until 1834. 

The Museum of the Acropolis contains artifacts found on and around the Acropolis from the Greek Bronze Age, Roman Greece and Byzantine Greece. Some of the artifacts still have remnants of their original colour dyes, and three of the museum's best displays include accompanying replicas that show what the statues would have looked like in their original time. Some of the Parthenon sculptures are plaster cast replicas, as the originals are in the British Museum.

The Temple of Olympian Zeus was the largest temple during the Roman era of Greece, but it was pillaged by barbarians in the third century A.D. and then heavily quarried for other building projects after the fall of the Roman Empire. Between the remaining columns, in the distant background, is the Acropolis of Athens.

While I find Ancient Greek (and Roman) history interesting, I felt like I needed a break from the plethora of ancient ruins, so I headed east towards more modern sites, including the National Gardens and the Panathenaic Stadium. It's odd that in my three days in Athens, I did not get around to climbing either Mount Lycabetus or Filopappou Hill, but this would have required too much time and energy just to see the city from a slightly different vantage point than the Acropolis.

The Panathenaic Stadium was originally built in the 5th century B.C., but was refurbished in the 1890's in order to host the first modern Olympic games. The stadium is much longer than the photo implies, as I took this from the open end.

The National Garden contains a mix of tropical and temperate trees as well as a few ponds and ruins. Pictured is the sundial at one of the garden's main entrances.

Despite my interest in Ancient Greek history, I'm not an archaeology buff, so after seeing several ancient ruins and visiting two museums with ancient artifacts, I knew that I'd be bored visiting the National Archaeology Museum. There is only so much you can see regarding one era in one country's history before everything gets repetitive. In lieu of this, I visited the Benaki Museum, which offered a wider variety of artifacts from the entire spectrum of Greek history.

The main building of the Benaki Museum contains artifacts spanning Greece's entire history. Pictured are various Greek Orthodox artifacts from the 16th and 17th centuries.

I had enough time to head over to Piraeus (a port west of Athens) to see the football match that evening, and along the way I came across a beautiful stretch of modern buildings that retained the classic Greco-Roman architecture (and were free of any graffiti).

Some of the modern buildings in Greece also utilize classic Greco-Roman architecture. Pictured is the front of the modern Academy of Athens. This building is part of a trilogy of similarly styled buildings lining Panepistimiou Street, along with the University of Athens and the National Library.

The football match was between Olympiacos and AEK Athens (so a city derby, although the rivalry between Olympiacos and Panathinaikos is more intense). The first thing I noticed entering the stadium was that the security staff made very little effort to search anyone for banned items (in fact, it felt like they were only pretending to search me), which meant a lot of fans were able to bring pyrotechnics (i.e. flares) to the game. This made for a great atmosphere, as along with the louder than normal chanting of the crowd, there was also a show of smoke and lights that accompanied the opening announcements and each of the home team's goals. As an example of this, here is a video of the first goal (off a corner kick):

Olympiacos is the perennial top team in Greece, so they constantly pressured AEK and won the match 4-0.

Georgios Karaiskakis Stadium at the beginning of the match between Olympiacos FC (the home team) and AEK Athens FC. The crowd also lit as many flares after the first three goals scored by Olympiacos, but very few after the fourth (the supporters either ran out of pyrotechnics or they didn't think the fourth goal was of much importance as the game was decided after the third goal).



Day 2

I spent the morning of the second day visiting the other sites accessible with my Acropolis ticket, which included Hadrian's Library and the Kerameikos (the neighbourhood where the potter's lived). Both sites were a lot like the Ancient Agora, filled with a lot of heavily weathered ruins. I'm not sure if it happens every morning or if it was due to the weather or time of year, but both sites also had more than a few tortoises crawling about. They were moderately sized (each about 10-12 inches from head to tail) but had no fear of humans, as they crawled casually around landmarks and across walkways. I was impressed by the determination of these tortoises to get to wherever they were going, because they completely ignored the annoying tourists that were poking at them or pulling at their legs, and just kept crawling at the same pace.

Two of the few structures still standing in Hadrian's Library. The main entrance on the other side also had a wall and another set of columns that were still in good shape.

My first excursion was to Aegina, a Greek island about 25km west of Athens. The ferry from Piraeus dropped me off on the west side of the island, at the port, and by the time I got there it was early afternoon. Consequently, after visiting the Apollo temple and its museum, I realized that I wouldn't have enough time to visit the marina on the east side of the island nor visit the island's other two landmarks (the Temple of Aphaea and Saint Nectarios church), so I just relaxed and checked out the small beaches and churches in the port area. The island reminded me a lot of Martha's Vineyard in the Boston area, a touristy island but still a laidback getaway from the big city.

A cove on the west side of Aegina. The beach here was pebbly, but there were smaller beaches south of here that were sandy (although covered with a lot of seaweed).

Ancient Aegina was home to a thriving civilization, responsible for building the Temple of Apollo in the 6th century B.C.  The one column still standing can be seen from sea as your ferry arrives in the port.

The port of Aegina is filled with various fishing boats and small pleasurecraft (apparently the marina has the nicer yachts). There is also a wide variety of cafes, restaurants and souvenir shops spanning the area.

Day 3

When I planned this trip, I considered takng the day trip to Delphi to see the Oracle (or what remained of it), but I thought it was too much time to spend an entire day (four hours one-way by road) to see one ancient site, especially when I was able to walk to a countless number of other ruins in Athens. However, I still wanted to see an ancient city outside of Athens, and visiting Corinth only took half a day. The city also has some personal appeal, as my Biblical namesake wrote two famous letters to the Corinthians. The added bonus was that the trip to the ancient city passed by a more modern site, the Corinth Canal.

Completed in 1893, the Corinth Canal connects the Saronic Gulf in the Aegean Sea with the Corinth Gulf in the Ionian Sea.

A street in the agora of Ancient Corinth. In the background, there is an acropolis at the top of the mountain (the outline of a temple can be seen in the distance), but apparently there are no roads going to the top.

In the agora of Ancient Corinth, the remains of the Temple of Apollo.

The site of Ancient Corinth was also accompanied by a museum, which contained mostly pottery and weathered marble statues from the area.

After returning from Corinth, I had enough time before my flight to look around the Plaka area. This is basically the tourist area of Athens, containing souvenir shops, low- and high-end restaurants, and vendors selling local goods. This part of Athens was much cleaner than the rest of the city, although also more crowded with tourist traffic.

The Plaka district of Athens contains mostly shops and restaurants as well as two churches, including the Church of Panaghia Kapnikarea.

So that was Athens (and Aegina and Corinth) in three days. I was left wondering if I could have had a better trip going to Delphi instead of Corinth and to Hydros (or another island) instead of Aegina, but I think the excursions worked well considering the short duration of my stay in Greece. If I had booked more days, then I would have looked into more physical activities on the Greek islands (scuba diving perhaps?).

As for Athens itself, I think it's better than what the negative reviewers say. The key is to book excursions to other cities/islands to round out the experience. Unless you have a special interest in archaeology, you really only need a day (or at most two days) to see Athens. Granted, the graffiti in non-tourist areas is an eyesore and a shame for a city with such a proud history, but traveling is meant to be a learning experience and the slummy conditions were just as revealing of the state of modern Greece as any whitewashed landmark could have been.