Every year my brother and sister-in-law go sailing and always invite us along for the ride. It’s definitely not a rowboat on a pond; these are cruising class yachts with a crew in destinations including the Caribbean, Fiji, and this year Greece. Since they were going to fly into Athens, we all agreed that meeting up for several days in the capital would give us the time to catch up with each other and to explore a new city. With our travel agent hats firmly in place, Bill and I began the planning of how we were going to get to the Hellenic Republic, where we would stay, and what we would see. A future blog post will highlight the journey there while today I wanted to describe our visit and provide some tips to anyone who might want to vacation there as well.

When the French don’t understand something they might say the equivalent of “It’s all Chinese to me” and we expected to be uttering “It’s all Greek to me” once we disembarked from the Italian ferry in the port of Patra, but that wasn’t often the case. Signs were typically written in letters we didn’t recognize although Google translate’s instant camera feature took care of that. Almost everyone we encountered spoke English so shopping and dining posed no problems at all.

Hoping to get an introduction to the local cuisine on our first day, we booked a “10 Tastings of Athens” tour that fulfilled its promise of “food, drinks, must-sees and local hot spots”. I still may have trouble spelling kefalotyri, souvlaki, and spanakopita, especially in Greek letters but I now know where to get the best of each!

The daily schedule that worked for us was to have the morning for sightseeing, lunch at an air conditioned (!) restaurant or at least with a shady patio, and then dinner on our balcony with that beautiful view of the Acropolis you see across the top of today’s blog post. Hoping to beat the heat and the crowds we arrived at the 8:00 AM opening time of the “hill of the gods” and after an hour and a half we were ready to move on. We had all listened to an audio tour in advance that prepared us to appreciate seeing the multi-columned Parthenon, the 6 female statues supporting the roof of the Erechtheion, the Propylaea gateway, the Temple of Athena Nike, and the two theaters with Dionysus considered to be the world’s oldest stage.

Descending the hill we next went to see some of the 4000 objects that date from 3200 BC and later that were moved to the Acropolis Museum for safe keeping. There are sculptures, architectural elements, pottery, and inscriptions plus glass floors that allow you to see ongoing excavations of a neighborhood that began around 4000 BC.

The word “agora” can generally be translated as a “public space” used for social, political, religious, commercial, and cultural activities, a market place, or a covered walkway. That was our concentration for the next day with both the Ancient and the Roman agoras. The former, starting around 600 BC, is a collection of buildings including a temple, a stoa (a colonnaded, covered walkway), an altar, and the headquarters for the city council. The Romans built their agora 500 years later and it mainly served as a marketplace and a civic center, with shops, offices, a fountain and public toilets. Around that same time period and essentially next door, Roman emperor Hadrian had his library built to house at least 17,000 rolls of papyrus books. While those disappeared long ago due to fire or decay, we could still see the outer wall, the entrance, some of the 100 columns, and parts of the churches that were built inside the library complex.

Our final day in Athens had an early start with the 8:00 AM opening of the National Archeological Museum, described as “the largest and most important museum of ancient Greek art in the world.” We all recognized many of the statues including the Poseidon of Cape Artemision, the Horse and Jockey of Artemision, and the young man Antikythera Ephebe with eyes made of glass including pupils and irises that give them a realistic look. With more of the day left and entrance tickets still in our pockets, we moved on to some additional ancient sites.

If you’re going to build a temple to the king of the gods it has to be big and the Temple of Olympian Zeus certainly qualifies. Although only 16 of the original 104 enormous Corinthian columns remain, we were still impressed with their 17 meter (56 feet) height. The temple once housed a 12 meter (40 feet) tall gold and ivory statue of Zeus giving it the status as one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World.

Not much remains of the school that Aristotle opened in 335 BC but it was still fascinating to walk the area around the excavated traces of buildings, paths, and wells that this philosopher would have used. This was definitely an inspiring way to end our visit to Athens!

Good to know: Tour operators add a service charge to the tickets that they sell for all of the attractions we visited. We bought ours in advance from the Greek government’s Hellenic Heritage E-Ticket website https://hhticket.gr/tap_b2c_new/english/tap.exe?PM=P1N without additional charge. All of these tickets, tour operator and government issued, are skip-the-line that should really be called “skip-the-ticket-purchase-line”. With your barcode in hand you can go directly to the entrance gate where there still might be a line, scan your code, and enter without having to first wait in line to buy your ticket and then wait again to scan it. The tickets we bought were:

• Combined—Acropolis & Slopes, Ancient Agora, Handrian’s Library, Kerameikos, Aristotle’s School, Olympieion, Roman Agora—1 visit to each site within 5 consecutive days: 30 €
• National Archaeological Museum—Single use: 12 €
• Acropolis Museum—direct from museum—One by one: 15 €