5 Days in Athens

Walk up from the south side, past the Theatre of Dionysus, where the plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides were first performed, and look down into the Odeon of Herodes Atticus, a Roman theater of AD 161 that still hosts concerts in summer. Then climb through the Propylaea, the monumental gateway, onto the rock. The Parthenon, built in 447-432 BC by the architects Ictinus and Callicrates, with Phidias in charge of the sculpture, was a temple to Athena and a treasury for the money of the Athenian empire. It has no straight lines: the columns lean in and swell slightly, and the floor curves up in the middle, all to make it look perfectly straight from below.

It stood almost whole for two thousand years, as a church and then a mosque, until 26 September 1687, when a Venetian shell hit the gunpowder the Ottomans had stored inside and blew out its middle. In 1801-05 Lord Elgin's agents removed half of the surviving sculptures, which are now in the British Museum. Next to it, the Erechtheion has its porch held up by six marble women, the Caryatids. These are copies. Five originals are in the museum you'll visit next, and the sixth is in London.

One more story: on the night of 30 May 1941, two young men, Manolis Glezos and Apostolos Santas, climbed up and tore down the swastika flag the Germans had raised over the Acropolis, one of the first acts of resistance in occupied Europe.

Climb the metal stairs up the bare rock of the Areopagus, the "hill of Ares", next to the Acropolis entrance. In ancient Athens a council of elders sat here as a court for murder trials, and around AD 50 Saint Paul preached here to the Athenians about their altar "to an unknown god", a speech you can read on a bronze plaque at the foot of the rock.

It's just below the Acropolis exit, and from the top you look down over the Ancient Agora, your next stop, and across the whole city to the sea at Piraeus. At sunset it gets packed, which is why this plan comes here in the morning.

Walk down Apostolou Pavlou to the Ancient Agora, the marketplace and civic heart of ancient Athens. This is where citizens did business, voted on who to exile, argued in the shade of the porticoes, and where Socrates spent his days questioning anyone who'd stop, until the city put him on trial and he drank the hemlock in 399 BC. Today it's a green, quiet field of ruins under olive trees.

Above it stands the Temple of Hephaestus, built around 449-415 BC, one of the best-preserved Greek temples anywhere, with its roof still on because it served as a church. Opposite, the long two-story Stoa of Attalos was rebuilt in the 1950s by American archaeologists exactly as it was in the 2nd century BC, and it houses the museum, so you can see what the ruins around you looked like when they were new.

Walk back around the hill to Koukaki, just south of the Acropolis Museum, a residential neighborhood that has filled up with cafés, bakeries and small tavernas, where you can eat much better and cheaper than on the main tourist streets. Order a few plates for the table: horiatiki, the real Greek salad, with no lettuce and a slab of feta on top, tzatziki, fava (yellow split pea purée with onion and olive oil) and some grilled meat or fish.

The Acropolis Museum, by Bernard Tschumi, opened in 2009 at the foot of the hill, and it's one of the best museums in Europe. You walk in over glass floors with the excavated streets and houses of an ancient neighborhood below your feet, then up through the statues of the archaic Acropolis, still with traces of their paint, to the Caryatids on the first floor.

The top floor is the point. It's a glass gallery turned to the exact angle of the Parthenon, which you see through the windows, with the temple's sculpted frieze laid out at eye level in the order it ran around the building. The original marbles are cream-colored. The bright white plaster casts in the gaps are copies of the pieces in London, and they're there to make a point.

From the museum, walk five minutes west and up the pine-covered paths of Filopappou Hill, crowned by the tomb of a Roman prince of Commagene, Philopappos, who became a citizen of Athens. From here you look straight across at the Acropolis, at its own height, and on a clear evening all the way to the sea.

On the way up you pass the Pnyx, a rough stone platform cut into the hillside. This is where the assembly of Athenian citizens met in the 5th and 4th centuries BC, sometimes 6,000 men at a time, to debate and vote on war, peace and everything else, the first democracy in action. Lower down, a cave is pointed out as "Socrates' prison". There's no evidence for it.

Walk down the hill and along Apostolou Pavlou, the pedestrian promenade under the Acropolis, to Thissio, where café tables look up at the floodlit Parthenon, and on to Psyrri, an old craftsmen's quarter that is now full of tavernas, mezedopolia (meze restaurants) and bars. Greeks eat late, around 9 or 10pm, so you'll have time for a drink first.

The Varvakios market on Athinas Street has fed the city since 1886, in an iron-and-glass hall where butchers shout their prices and the fish hall glitters with ice and silver. It's noisy, wet underfoot and completely real. Across the street are the fruit and vegetable stalls, and all around are shops selling olives, cheeses, herbs, spices and cured meats.

For breakfast, do as Athenians do: grab a koulouri, a sesame bread ring, from a street cart, or a cheese pie from a bakery. Next to the market, Diporto, a basement taverna without a sign, has been feeding traders for more than a century. Remember it for a lunch of chickpea soup and grilled sardines on another day.

Two minutes away on Aiolou Street, Krinos has been frying loukoumades since 1923: small balls of dough, crisp outside and soft inside, soaked in honey syrup and dusted with cinnamon. They come hot from the fryer, the room hasn't changed in decades, and a plate costs a few euros. If it's closed (it is on Sundays), Stani, a dairy shop near Omonia (founded in Piraeus in 1931), makes them too, along with the best sheep's-milk yogurt with honey and walnuts in town.

Walk south down Aiolou to Ermou, the main shopping street, which runs straight around a small Byzantine church built around 1050, Kapnikarea, which was nearly demolished in the 1830s to straighten the street until King Ludwig of Bavaria, the new king's father, asked for it to be spared. A few minutes south is the Metropolitan Cathedral, the big 19th-century seat of the Archbishop of Athens, and next to it, dwarfed by it, the little 12th-century church of Panagia Gorgoepikoos, built with fragments of older Greek and Roman buildings in its walls.

Walk west along Ermou to Monastiraki Square, with the Acropolis rising behind it, the metro station, the small Pantanassa church, the monastery that gave the square its name, and the Tzistarakis Mosque, built in 1759 by an Ottoman governor who, legend says, burned one of the columns of the Temple of Olympian Zeus to make lime for it. Off the square, Ifestou Street is the flea market, with everything from army surplus and copper pots to vinyl records and bad souvenirs, and on Sunday mornings the antiques market spreads around Avissinias Square. Have lunch in Psyrri, just north of the square.

Right behind the square are two ruins from the time Athens was a university town of the Roman Empire. Hadrian's Library, built around AD 132 by the emperor who loved Athens most, was a huge courtyard with reading rooms and a garden. A few steps away, the Roman Agora was the later marketplace, and at its edge stands its treasure: the Tower of the Winds, an octagonal marble tower built by the astronomer Andronicus of Cyrrhus as a water clock, sundial and weather vane, with the eight winds carved on its sides. Under the Ottomans, dervishes used it for their ceremonies.

Plaka is the old town on the slopes below the Acropolis, a maze of 19th-century houses, steps and bougainvillea. Above it, tucked against the rock, is Anafiotika, a tiny village of whitewashed cube houses built in the 1830s and 40s by stonemasons from the island of Anafi, who came to build King Otto's new capital and recreated their island at the foot of the Acropolis. Wander up its narrow lanes and you'll forget you're in a city of four million.

On the way down, find the Lysicrates Monument, a small round monument of 334 BC celebrating a theater prize. In 1810-11, it stood in the garden of a Capuchin monastery where Lord Byron stayed.

Rebetiko is often called the Greek blues: songs of poverty, love, prison, hashish and exile, played on the bouzouki and baglamas. It grew up in the port and city slums in the early 20th century and was transformed by the more than a million refugees who arrived from Asia Minor after 1922, bringing the music of Smyrna and Istanbul with them. Banned or frowned on for decades, it's now loved across the country, and a night of it, with meze and tsipouro, is one of the best things to do in Athens.

Klimataria, a taverna on Theatrou Square in Psyrri, has live rebetiko most nights from about 10pm, and Pipis in Kerameikos is another good place to hear it.

Syntagma, "Constitution", Square is named for the uprising of 3 September 1843, when the army and the people surrounded the palace of the Bavarian King Otto and forced him to grant a constitution. That palace, built in 1836-43, has been the Greek Parliament since 1935, and in front of it is the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, guarded day and night by the Evzones, the presidential guard.

Their uniform comes from the mountain fighters of the War of Independence: a kilt with 400 pleats, one for each year of Ottoman rule, as the story goes, wool stockings and red clogs with black pompoms, each weighing about three kilos. Every hour, the guards change in a slow, high-kicking ritual. On Sundays at 11am, the full company marches in with a band.

Behind Parliament is the National Garden, laid out from 1838 for Queen Amalia, Otto's wife, who had trees and plants brought in from all over the world. Today it's a shady, slightly overgrown park with ponds, ducks and old men on benches, and a welcome break from the traffic. At its southern end stands the Zappeion, a grand neoclassical hall built in 1874-88 by the Danish architect Theophil Hansen and paid for by two Greek cousins who made their fortune in Romania.

From the Zappeion, walk five minutes west to the Temple of Olympian Zeus, the biggest temple in Greece. The tyrant Peisistratos's sons began it around 520 BC, then work stopped for centuries, and it was only finished by Hadrian in AD 131-132, more than 600 years later. It had 104 columns, each 17 m tall. Fifteen are still standing, and a sixteenth lies where a storm blew it down in 1852, in pieces like a stack of coins.

On the street corner stands Hadrian's Arch, free to look at, with two inscriptions: on one side "This is Athens, the ancient city of Theseus", on the other "This is the city of Hadrian, and not of Theseus".

Walk ten minutes east along Vasilissis Olgas to the Panathenaic Stadium, the only stadium in the world built entirely of marble. There was a stadium here in the 4th century BC, and the Roman Herodes Atticus gave it marble seats in the 2nd century AD. In the 1890s it was rebuilt in white Pentelic marble, paid for by the merchant Georgios Averoff, for the first modern Olympic Games of 1896. It's still the finish line of the Athens Marathon every November.

The audio guide is included. Walk up to the top row for the view, then run a lap of the old track and stand on the winners' podium. Everybody does.

Right behind the stadium is Pangrati, a neighborhood where Athenians actually live, with cafés around Varnava Square and old tavernas on its side streets. Vyrinis, an old taverna with a courtyard garden, and Mavros Gatos are good for a long lunch of the classics: moussaka, pastitsio (baked pasta with meat sauce and béchamel), gemista (stuffed tomatoes and peppers), meatballs and a jug of house wine.

Take a taxi or walk 20 minutes up to Kolonaki, the city's smartest neighborhood, for the Museum of Cycladic Art, the private collection of the Goulandris family. Its stars are the marble figurines made on the Cycladic islands about 5,000 years ago, mostly women with arms folded and faces reduced to a nose. They look astonishingly modern, and Picasso, Brâncuși and Modigliani loved them.

Around the corner on Vasilissis Sofias is the Benaki Museum, the story of Greece from antiquity to the 20th century in one family's collection, with a rooftop café, and a few minutes further on the Byzantine and Christian Museum. Pick one, or come back on another day. Afterwards, have a coffee in Kolonaki Square, where Athens's well-dressed come to be seen.

From Kolonaki, ride the funicular through the hill, or walk up the path through the pines in about 30 minutes, to the top of Mount Lycabettus, 277 m high and the highest point in central Athens, crowned by the small white chapel of Saint George. The view is the best in the city: the Acropolis looking small for once, the whole white sprawl of Athens out to the mountains, and the sea, with the islands of the Saronic Gulf, where the sun goes down.

Have a drink on the terrace at the top, then walk down to Kolonaki or Exarchia for dinner.

The National Archaeological Museum holds the finest collection of ancient Greek art in the world, and it deserves a morning. Start with the gold of Mycenae, including the gold death mask that Heinrich Schliemann dug up in 1876 and called the Mask of Agamemnon. It's about 300 years older than any Agamemnon could have been, but the name stuck.

Then the bronzes pulled from the sea: the Artemision Bronze, a god about to hurl a thunderbolt or a trident, from around 460 BC (scholars still argue whether it's Zeus or Poseidon), and the Jockey of Artemision, a small boy on a galloping horse. Finally, find the Antikythera Mechanism, a corroded lump of bronze gears from a shipwreck, recovered in 1901, which turned out to be an astronomical calculator from the 2nd or 1st century BC, the oldest known analog computer.

Exarchia, around the museum, is the student and anarchist quarter, covered in graffiti and political posters and full of bookshops, cheap tavernas and bars. Parts of Exarchia Square have been fenced off for years for the works on the new metro line 4, but the streets around it are as lively as ever. Its history is political: in November 1973, students at the Polytechnic next to the museum rose against the military junta, and tanks crushed the uprising, which still marks the neighborhood every 17 November.

Rozalia, a taverna with a courtyard on Valtetsiou Street since 1978, is a good place for lunch. Order grilled meats, saganaki (fried cheese) and a salad, and watch the neighborhood go by.

Take a taxi or the metro to Thissio and walk to Kerameikos, the potters' quarter of ancient Athens and its biggest cemetery. The Sacred Way to Eleusis left the city here through the Sacred Gate, and next to it the Dipylon, the city's biggest gate, led out to Plato's Academy. Wealthy Athenians lined the road with marble tombs and statues, some still standing. It was here that Pericles gave his funeral oration for the first dead of the Peloponnesian War in 431 BC, the speech Thucydides recorded as the great defense of Athenian democracy. Few visitors come, turtles wander among the graves, and it's one of the calmest places in the city.

Afterwards, have a look at Gazi next door, where the old gasworks has become Technopolis, a cultural center, and the streets around it fill up with bars at night.

Take a taxi down to the coast at Kallithea, about 20 minutes, to the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Cultural Center, the home of the National Opera and the National Library, designed by Renzo Piano and opened in 2016. It sits under a huge, thin solar canopy at the top of a park that slopes up from the sea, planted with Mediterranean trees and herbs, with a long canal at its foot. The park is free and open until midnight.

Walk up the slope to the lighthouse terrace on the roof, the best free view in Athens: the Acropolis and Lycabettus on one side, the whole bay of Faliro and the islands of the Saronic Gulf on the other, where the sun goes down into the sea.

Ten minutes by taxi along the coast, Mikrolimano is a small round harbor in Piraeus, full of yachts and lined with fish tavernas whose tables stand right at the water's edge. It's the classic place for a seafood dinner by the sea without leaving the city: grilled fish sold by weight, fried kalamarakia (squid), marinated anchovies, octopus and a carafe of white wine or ouzo. Ask the price of the fish by the kilo before you choose one.

The boat turns a corner of a bare rocky island and suddenly there's a horseshoe harbor ringed by gray stone mansions climbing the hill. Hydra got rich on shipping in the 18th century, and its captains turned their fleet into the backbone of the Greek navy in the War of Independence of 1821. There are no cars or motorbikes here, only donkeys, mules and water taxis, and the town has barely changed in two hundred years. Artists discovered it in the 1950s, and Leonard Cohen bought a house here in 1960.

Climb up to the Lazaros Kountouriotis Mansion, the 18th-century house of a family of shipowners and admirals, now a museum of island life (open daily until the end of October), or visit the Historical Archives Museum on the harbor, with relics of the revolution.

Avoid the cafés right on the harbor and walk up into the lanes. Xeri Elia (also known as Douskos), an old family taverna under a big tree in a little square, is a classic, said to have been one of Cohen's favorites. Order grilled fish, horta (boiled wild greens with olive oil and lemon) and a cold bottle of white.

Walk west along the coastal path, about 15 minutes, to Kamini, a tiny fishing harbor with painted boats, and on to the rocks and pebble coves beyond it, or as far as Vlychos, about 40 minutes from town. The water is clear enough to see the bottom at ten meters, and in September and October it's still warm. Kodylenia's at Kamini is a good place for a drink with your feet almost in the sea before you walk back to the boat.

Back in Athens, end the trip on a rooftop facing the floodlit Acropolis. 360 on Monastiraki Square, A for Athens next door and Couleur Locale on Normanou Street all have terraces looking straight at the Parthenon. Have a cocktail or an ouzo, then go down for a long last dinner in Psyrri or Plaka's back streets.