Half Day Athens Private Shore Excursion

Meeting at the port

Meeting at the Piraeus cruise terminal, where your guide and driver are waiting. The start time is given approximately and will be adjusted to your ship's arrival; the exact time is on your confirmation letter.

Panathenaic Stadium

The Panathenaic Stadium, the only stadium in the world built entirely of marble. It was cut into the hillside in the 4th century BC for the Panathenaic Games, rebuilt in marble by Herodes Atticus in AD 144, and excavated and restored in time to hold the first modern Olympic Games in 1896. It seats about fifty thousand and the Olympic flame is still handed over here.

Syntagma Square and the guard

Syntagma Square, named for the constitution wrung out of King Otto in 1843, with the Hellenic Parliament above it in the old royal palace. The Evzones of the presidential guard stand at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier and change on the hour in a slow ceremonial drill, wearing the pleated fustanella and shoes with sixty nails in each sole.

Temple of Olympian Zeus

The Temple of Olympian Zeus, begun by the tyrants in the 6th century BC and left unfinished for six hundred and fifty years until Hadrian completed it in AD 131. It was the largest temple in Greece, with a hundred and four columns seventeen metres high; fifteen still stand, and a sixteenth lies where a storm dropped it in 1852. Hadrian's Arch stands beside it.

The Acropolis

The Acropolis, the rock the city was built around and the site of the greatest building programme of the ancient world, funded by Athens at its height under Pericles. You climb through the Propylaea of 437 BC, past the small Temple of Athena Nike, to the Parthenon, raised between 447 and 432 BC by Iktinos and Kallikrates with sculpture by Phidias, its columns swelling and leaning by a few centimetres so that the eye reads them as straight. Opposite it stands the Erechtheion with its porch of six caryatids, and below on the south slope the Odeon of Herodes Atticus of AD 161, still used for concerts every summer.

Acropolis Museum

The Acropolis Museum, opened in 2009 to a design by Bernard Tschumi on columns above a live excavation you look down on through glass floors. The top gallery is a glass hall set at the same angle as the Parthenon and the same size, holding the frieze in daylight with the temple itself in view through the windows, and the gaps left for the sculptures held in London.

Plaka

Plaka, the old quarter under the north slope, where neoclassical houses, bougainvillea and small tavernas fill a maze of lanes, and Monastiraki beside it with its flea market. Guests who would rather not climb the rock can spend the time here.

Return to the ship

The drive back to Piraeus, timed to your ship's departure