Ruins of Athens

Athens Beyond the Acropolis: The Ruins That Don’t Make the Headlines

Most visitors come to Athens for the Acropolis. Having done the Acropolis, a significant number feel they’ve done Athens and leave. This misses the Ancient Agora, the Kerameikos cemetery, the National Archaeological Museum, and the Roman Agora, which are collectively as rewarding as the Acropolis and see a fraction of the visitor numbers.

There is a combined ticket (€20 in season, €10 off-season) that covers all the major archaeological sites including the Acropolis, and is valid for five days. Buy it at any of the included sites to avoid the Acropolis entrance queue.

The Ancient Agora

The Agora was the commercial, civic, and social centre of classical Athens: where the markets were, where the law courts sat, where Socrates argued with passersby. The surviving structures include the Temple of Hephaestus (the best-preserved ancient Greek temple in the world, significantly better than the Parthenon), which has been standing largely intact since the 5th century BCE because it was converted to a Christian church in the 7th century CE and remained in use.

The Stoa of Attalos was completely reconstructed in the 1950s by the American School of Classical Studies and now houses the Agora Museum. The reconstruction is faithful and gives the best sense available anywhere in Greece of what a 2nd-century BCE commercial colonnade actually looked like in use. The collection includes objects of everyday Athenian life: official voting tokens, children’s toys, potters’ kiln equipment, and a marble fragment inscribed with names of people condemned to ostracism.

The Kerameikos

The Kerameikos cemetery, 800 metres west of the Ancient Agora, is one of the most evocative sites in Athens and almost entirely absent from standard tourist itineraries. It was the primary burial ground of ancient Athens from the 12th century BCE onward; the Sacred Way to Eleusis began here. Original grave stelae and grave markers stand in position; the funerary sculptures are extraordinary in their quality (originals are in the on-site museum; some in the National Archaeological Museum).

The site includes sections of the ancient city wall (built in 479 BCE after the Persian sack and including earlier grave monuments in the construction, which is archaeologically revealing), the Sacred Gate, and the Dipylon Gate. Allow two hours and expect almost no crowds.

The National Archaeological Museum

The National Archaeological Museum on 28 Oktovriou Street is the most important archaeological collection in the world for Greek antiquities, and it is consistently undervisited relative to what it contains. The Mycenaean room alone (ground floor, first major gallery to the left) contains the Mask of Agamemnon, the bronze daggers from the shaft graves at Mycenae, and gold jewellery from the Bronze Age royal burials. The room is genuinely overwhelming.

The Thira room contains frescoes from the Bronze Age city of Akrotiri on Santorini, buried by a volcanic eruption around 1628 BCE. The “Fisherman” and “Spring” frescoes are as vivid as any Renaissance painting. The Antikythera Mechanism (a 2nd-century BCE analogue computer for predicting astronomical events) has its own case and is thoroughly documented in a display that attempts to convey what it actually did.

Give this museum four hours minimum. Most people give it ninety minutes and leave confused by scale.

Monastiraki and Psyrri

The Monastiraki neighbourhood, adjacent to the Ancient Agora, has the main flea market (Sundays are the true market; weekdays are souvenir shops). The Sunday market sprawls east through the Avissinias Square area with furniture, books, ceramics, coins, and general urban archaeology.

Psyrri, immediately north of Monastiraki, is the restaurant and bar district that has the best ratio of quality-to-price-to-tourist-density. Dinner at 9pm at one of the outdoor tables on a side street with wine and slow-cooked lamb is the correct Athens evening.

The Acropolis Museum below the Acropolis hill, opened in 2009 in a building specifically designed to hold the Parthenon sculptures at their original scale and height, is where the genuine discussion of the Elgin Marbles is most visually legible: the museum displays its sculptures alongside exact-scale casts of the London sections, making the absence of the originals concrete rather than abstract. Allow three hours.