Everybody does the Acropolis first, and everybody should, and then a lot of people are quietly disappointed by the rest of the week. The disappointment is a sequencing error: you have started with the single most famous object in European architecture and then gone looking for something to follow it.
Nothing follows it. Go sideways instead. Athens has perhaps a dozen small museums and sites that would each be the main attraction in a smaller city, and several of them are almost empty on a Tuesday.
From Lycabettus, which is a funicular and ten minutes, and which nobody does. Photo: Maksim Romashkin.
Four that are worth a morning each
- The Kerameikos, the ancient cemetery, with a small museum and about six other visitors.
- The Byzantine and Christian Museum, for the thousand years everybody skips between the temples and the modern city.
- The Numismatic Museum, in Schliemann’s house, which is worth it for the house alone.
- The Benaki, whichever branch — the collections are split across four buildings and all four are good.
The Acropolis Museum is the exception to the small-is-better rule. Go on the same ticket, on the same day, before the hill rather than after it.
Timing the hill
First entry, or the last ninety minutes. In July the middle of the day on that rock is genuinely dangerous and there is no shade anywhere on it. The evening slot is better than the morning one, because the marble goes orange and the crowd has thinned to people who also read this somewhere.
