All Roads Lead to the Acropolis

If there is one country that has long been on my bucket list, it’s Greece. As a philosophy major in college, I intensively studied texts from pre-Socratic philosophers all the way to Aristotle. It was only natural that, after graduation, I would visit Greece.

That graduation was thirteen years ago. Since then, I have not one, but TWO, failed attempts at visiting Greece. The first was a 2-week Greece-and-Italy trip with a friend that turned into an Italy-only trip once we arrived in Venice and realized 2 weeks was too short to visit two countries (rookie mistake!); the second was after our road trip through Turkey in 2015 when, due to Bruno’s date with a scalpel, we had to beeline through central Europe to get back to France rather than head into Greece.

So you can imagine that when my best friend, Alex, announced that she would be getting married in my #1 bucket list country, I didn’t need a lot of arm twisting to RSVP.

Our three week trip to Greece would include ten nights on the island of Paros, where Alex would be married, followed by an 8-day stay in the holiday home of some Greek overlanding friends we made many years ago in Kenya.

But first, we would [naturally] start our Greece adventure in Athens. Though I’d heard more than once that Athens wasn’t a great travel destination – hot, dirty, overly-touristy – this Greek philosophy buff was pretty pumped to see some of the most important sites in all of western civilization!

We hit the ground running. Or should I say I hit the ground running. Unsurprisingly, I had made a pretty long list of things I wanted to see and do during our three full days in Athens, and they started the morning after our red-eye flight. But Bruno – not a city-lover under the best circumstances, but now also the father of a toddler – had other ideas. He was happy to do a wee bit of wandering, but with the heat and smog and traffic and jet lag, he actually preferred to stay home and let me check off my long list of sites alone. Way to take one for the team, Bruno!

It was pretty strange how normal it felt to be wandering a city alone, like I used to do back before my mothering days. I started things off – as I often do – with a free walking tour of the main historic sites. I like doing this because it gives me a historical overview as well as helping me get my bearings of the layout of the city and bookmark any key sites I want to return to later. This tour did the trick, and gave me two additional benefits: 1) it illuminated a few interesting sites that I didn’t know about, and 2) it assured me that most of Athens’ ancient ruins could be experienced satisfactorily without paying a ticket to enter the grounds.

As our tour guide led us from one ruin to another, we kept getting views of the most-famed site in perhaps all of Greece – the Acropolis. In fact, I caught my first few as I arrived in Monastiraki Square, where our tour group met (and it was glorious). Again and again, no matter where we were, the Acropolis would pop into view, towering over the city. It seemed like all roads in Athens lead to the Acropolis!

I was definitely pumped to get up to the Acropolis, but I wanted to be smart about visiting the site I’d waited so long to see. First – on the recommendation of my tour guide – I opted to check out the New Acropolis Museum. My boys came as well – it was calm and air-conditioned, after all. The museum holds most of the original items from the Acropolis (most things at the site itself are now replicas) and its layout is designed to model that of the Acropolis, too. That means that on the first floor going up are items found along the hillsides of the Acropolis, on the east side are things found on the east side of the Acropolis, and so forth. As a bonus, when the museum was built, ruins of ancient Athens were discovered underneath, so now you can descend below the museum and actually visit them!

On our second morning in Athens, I convinced the boys to wander the streets of ancient Plaka with me. It’s the most-touristy area of town, but it’s also very cute. Little orthodox churches hold space between shops and cafes, and ancient ruins rub shoulders with the traffic and construction of a modern megalopolis. It’s a charming neighborhood, though it definitely makes me want to pull out my wallet and spend money on stuff I can’t fit in my bus!

We also visited the Greek parliament to witness their hourly changing of the guards ceremony. Apart from the serious solemnity and pomp of the guards, it was quite a different ceremony from the one in Buckingham Palace. The Greek guards – who were all tall and slim – did a lot of slow leg kicking and leg-holding, rather than traditional marching. It was much smaller scale, for sure, but it was interesting to see another country’s interpretation of this tradition.

The afternoon had finally arrived, and with that my plan to visit the Acropolis. I’d decided to visit in the later part of the day because I wanted to avoid crowds (which are insane!) but figured there was no way I would manage – with Phoenix – to be out of the house by the required 8am to skip the long lines and miss the crowds. Plus, in the morning, I would have had to skip all the ruins on the hills and beeline straight for the Parthenon to beat the crowds. This way, I could take my time going up and be near the Parthenon as the heat abated and the golden hour of light set in.

I was glad to have gotten a better historical and archaeological preparation before my visit of the Acropolis, and to have timed my visit as I did. The build-up to visit the Acropolis was just right, and it did not disappoint. Every step I took on this ancient rock felt meaningful. The view overlooking modern Athens, with its white facades shimmering in the sun and a distant glimpse of the Aegean Sea , was breathtaking. The Parthenon itself was under renovation – with cranes inside and no tourist access, but I preferred the temple with the Caryatid statues, anyway.

Best of all, though, were the two theaters – the Theater of Dionysus and the Odeon of Herodes Atticus – on the hillsides of the Acropolis. I had studied ancient plays that had actually been performed on the stage of Dionysus’ theater thousands of years before (the one I remember most, actually, was called The Bacchae, and actually featured Dionysus – the God of wine and debauchery – himself!) And now, here I was walking along these rocks, sitting on the same seats. As cliche as it sounds, the experience was practically spiritual.

Yes, the Acropolis did not disappoint. Nor did Athens, actually. Despite its intense summer heat, traffic, and mass tourism, I found exactly what I was looking for there – a chance to walk in the footsteps of all those philosophers I studied and loved all those years ago.

And anyway, you can’t go wrong in a city whose roads all lead to the Acropolis, right?