Athens, from the top deck

Welcome aboard. You're starting in Syntagma, which means constitution, and the square earned that name in a single night. A full loop takes about an hour and twenty minutes if you stay in your seat, and you can hop off and back on wherever you like, so there's no need to see everything at once.

The long, plain building across the avenue was built as a palace for Otto, a Bavarian prince whom the great powers made king of the new Greek state in eighteen thirty-two. He arrived the following year, aged seventeen, with Bavarian advisers and Bavarian soldiers, and his father, King Ludwig, lent him the money for the palace. The men who had actually fought the War of Independence watched foreigners take the best jobs while the king ruled without a constitution, and after ten years their patience ran out.

On the night of the second of September, eighteen forty-three, the Athens garrison marched into this square, led by a cavalry colonel named Dimitrios Kallergis. Behind the plot was a group of veterans and politicians that included General Makrygiannis, whose neighbourhood is our next stop. By morning half the town had joined them. Otto came to the window and was told, very politely and with a great many bayonets, that nobody was leaving until he granted a constitution. By the afternoon he had agreed. An assembly wrote it the following spring, and the square has been Syntagma ever since. Otto kept his throne for another nineteen years, until the Greeks ran out of patience again and sent him home to Bavaria.

The palace has housed the Parliament since the nineteen thirties. In front of it, look for the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, a dying warrior carved in relief, with a line from Pericles beside him: the whole earth is the tomb of famous men. The guards are Evzones, in a uniform taken from the mountain fighters of the War of Independence. The kilt is said to have four hundred pleats, one for each year of Ottoman rule, and each red clog weighs about a kilo and a half, with dozens of nails in the sole, which is why that slow, high-kicking march sounds the way it does. They change every hour, and the full ceremony with the band is at eleven on Sunday mornings.

The grand hotel on the corner of the square is the Grande Bretagne, a hotel since eighteen seventy-four. On Christmas Day nineteen forty-four, when it was the British headquarters, resistance fighters packed the sewers beneath it with dynamite, then called the attack off when they learned that Winston Churchill had just arrived. History in Athens is like that. It's usually right under your feet.

Welcome aboard. You're starting in Syntagma, which means constitution, and the square earned that name in a single night. The long, plain building across the avenue was built as the palace of Otto, the Bavarian prince chosen as the first king of modern Greece. On the third of September, eighteen forty-three, the army and a great crowd of Athenians filled this square and refused to go home until he promised them a constitution. He did. The palace is now the Parliament, and the soldiers in front of it guard the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.

This neighbourhood is named after General Ioannis Makrygiannis, who owned a house and fields here, just under the south side of the Acropolis, and he's one of the best people you can meet in Greek history. The stop itself is named for Melina Merkouri, the film star who became Minister of Culture and spent years fighting to bring the Parthenon sculptures home. You'll hear more about her at the next stop.

He was born in the mountains of central Greece in seventeen ninety-seven, had almost no schooling, and was a trader and a fighter by his twenties. In the War of Independence he was wounded again and again, three times in the head and neck while helping to hold the Acropolis during the Ottoman siege of eighteen twenty-six. Then, in eighteen twenty-nine, stationed in Argos, a man who had only just learned to write sat down and began his memoirs, in the spoken Greek of the villages, spelled the way it sounded.

The memoirs are furious, funny and honest. He's hard on the politicians, hard on the foreigners, and harder still on his fellow captains when they put themselves first. His best-known line says that the country was won by everyone together, that we stand in the we and not in the I. He was one of the leaders of the night you just heard about in Syntagma, and in eighteen fifty-three a government that found him inconvenient put him on trial and sentenced him to death. The sentence was commuted, and he was released the following year, but when he died in eighteen sixty-four the manuscript was hidden away. It was found decades later with the help of his son and published in nineteen-oh-seven, and George Seferis, who later won the Nobel Prize, called him one of the greatest masters of modern Greek prose.

Up the slope is Plaka, the oldest part of the modern town, with its lanes, tavernas and neoclassical houses. Climb high enough and you reach Anafiotika, a tiny village of whitewashed cube houses jammed against the foot of the rock. It was built from the eighteen forties by builders from the island of Anafi, who came to work on Otto's palace. The story goes that they made use of an old Ottoman rule that a house put up between sunset and sunrise belonged to whoever built it, so they built their homes by night. Whether or not the law said quite that, the houses are still there, and so are the cats.

This neighbourhood is named after General Makrygiannis, a hero of the War of Independence who owned a house and fields here, just under the south side of the Acropolis. He had almost no schooling, learned to write as a grown man, and left memoirs so vivid that the Nobel-winning poet George Seferis called him one of the great masters of modern Greek prose. Up the slope is Plaka, the oldest part of the modern town, and above it Anafiotika, a little village of whitewashed island houses squeezed against the rock.

The glass and concrete building is the Acropolis Museum, designed by the Swiss-American architect Bernard Tschumi and opened in June two thousand and nine. When the builders dug the foundations they found a whole Athenian neighbourhood underneath, with streets, houses, workshops and drains spanning many centuries, so the museum stands on columns above it. As you walk in, you look down through the glass floor at the city it replaced.

The museum was built to make an argument, and the top floor is where it makes it. The Parthenon Gallery is turned, by about twenty-three degrees, to line up exactly with the temple up on the rock, which you can see through the glass walls. Around it hangs the frieze, the long band of carving that once ran around the top of the temple's inner walls, behind the columns. It shows the great procession of the Panathenaic festival: horsemen, chariots, musicians, cattle led to sacrifice, and the gods waiting at the end. Here it's hung at eye level, in its original order. The pieces still in Athens are honey-coloured marble. The pieces in the British Museum are shown as plaster casts, bright white, and there are a great many of them.

They went to London in the early eighteen hundreds, when Lord Elgin, the British ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, had his agents remove about half of the surviving sculpture from the temple. He sold it to the British government in eighteen sixteen. Greece has pressed for their return for generations, and hardest since the actress Melina Merkouri, as Minister of Culture, made it a national cause in the nineteen eighties. The British Museum's answer is that the marbles were acquired legally and belong in a museum of world culture. This building is the reply, with the frieze laid out in the same shape as the temple itself and room left for the rest.

On the floor below are the Caryatids, five of the six marble women who held up the porch of the Erechtheion. They were brought indoors to protect them from the city's pollution, and cleaned with lasers in front of the visitors. The sixth is in London too, and the place where she belongs is left empty.

If you have time, take a coffee on the restaurant terrace. It looks straight up at the rock, which is the whole point of the place.

The glass and concrete building is the Acropolis Museum, designed by Bernard Tschumi and opened in two thousand and nine. It stands on columns over an excavated Athenian neighbourhood, and on the way in you look down through a glass floor at its streets and houses. The top floor is turned to line up exactly with the Parthenon, and the frieze hangs around it as it did on the temple: the pieces still in Athens in marble, and the pieces in London as bright white plaster casts. The contrast is entirely deliberate.

This is the stop for the Acropolis itself, and for the hills around it, which are some of the best walking in the city.

Up on the rock, the Parthenon looks like a building made of straight lines, and almost none of them are. It went up between four forty-seven and four thirty-two BC, under Pericles, with the architects Iktinos and Kallikrates and the sculptor Pheidias in charge of the carving. The platform rises gently toward the middle, by about six centimetres across the ends and eleven along the sides, so it's really a very shallow dome. The columns swell slightly partway up, and they all lean a little inward; carry them upward and they'd meet a couple of kilometres up in the sky. The corner columns are thicker than the rest, because a column seen against open sky looks thinner than it is. Nearly every block was cut for one place and no other, which is a headache for the restorers and the reason it looks, from below, effortlessly straight.

It survived more or less whole for two thousand years, as a temple, then a church, then a mosque. Then in September sixteen eighty-seven a Venetian army besieged the Ottoman garrison, who had stored their gunpowder inside, and a Venetian mortar shell found it. The explosion blew out the middle of the building, and the restorers have been piecing it back together ever since.

Now look for the low, rocky hill facing the Acropolis from the west. That's the Pnyx, and it matters as much as the temple. This is where the assembly of Athens met, every adult male citizen who chose to come, often six thousand at a time, sitting on the slope to debate war and peace and vote by a show of hands. Anyone could speak from the stone platform, which is still there, cut into the rock. Attendance was a problem, naturally. Aristophanes jokes about the rope dipped in red paint that was swept through the market to herd people up the hill, so that anyone with red on his clothes was known to be dodging. Eventually Athens simply started paying people to come.

On the way up you pass the Odeon of Herodes Atticus, the steep stone theatre built in the second century AD by a fabulously rich Athenian in memory of his wife, and still used for concerts on summer nights. Between the rock and the Pnyx is the Areopagus, the bare outcrop where St Paul is said to have preached. And the stone paths you walk on up here were laid in the nineteen fifties by the architect Dimitris Pikionis, every piece chosen and set by hand, in the spirit of the temple above.

This is the stop for the Acropolis itself. Up on the rock, the Parthenon looks like a building made of straight lines, and almost none of them are. The floor rises gently toward the middle, the columns swell and lean inward, and the corner columns are a little thicker, all so that it looks perfectly straight from below. On the low hill facing it, the Pnyx, the citizens of Athens met in their thousands to vote on war, peace and taxes. The rock belonged to the gods. The hill across the way belonged to the people.

The tall columns in the field ahead belong to the Temple of Olympian Zeus, which has a fair claim to be the slowest building project in the history of Athens.

It was begun around five twenty BC by Hippias and Hipparchos, the sons of the tyrant Peisistratos, who wanted a temple bigger than anything the Greeks had built. Then the tyranny fell, and the democracy that replaced it had no interest in finishing a tyrant's vanity project. Aristotle later used it as his example of how tyrants keep their people too busy and too poor to rebel. For more than three centuries it stood half-built.

In one seventy-four BC a Hellenistic king, Antiochus the Fourth, decided to finish it, and hired a Roman architect, Decimus Cossutius, who redesigned it with a hundred and four tall Corinthian columns. Antiochus died, and work stopped again. Then the Roman general Sulla sacked Athens in eighty-six BC and shipped some of the unfinished columns off to Rome for a temple on the Capitol, which is a very Roman way of helping.

The man who finally finished it, around one thirty-two AD, was the emperor Hadrian, who loved Athens, had served as one of its chief magistrates before he became emperor, and wanted the city to love him back. Inside he placed a gold and ivory statue of Zeus, and beside it, to be on the safe side, a colossal statue of himself. Fifteen of the columns still stand, more than seventeen metres tall. A sixteenth blew down in a storm in eighteen fifty-two and lies where it fell, its drums spread out like a toppled stack of coins.

The gateway beside the road is Hadrian's Arch. On the side facing the Acropolis the inscription says, This is Athens, the ancient city of Theseus. On the side facing the temple it says, This is the city of Hadrian, and not of Theseus. Historians used to think the arch marked the line between the old town and Hadrian's new quarter, but excavation has shown that the old city wall ran somewhere else. So it's less a boundary than a boast, carved in marble by a man who had paid for a great deal of the city and wanted everyone to know it.

The tall columns in the field ahead belong to the Temple of Olympian Zeus, which has a fair claim to be the slowest building project in Athenian history. The sons of the tyrant Peisistratos started it around five twenty BC, and the Roman emperor Hadrian finally finished it, about six hundred and forty years later. Fifteen columns still stand, each more than seventeen metres tall. The gateway beside the road is Hadrian's Arch, with an inscription on each side, and the two don't quite agree.

The green wall along the avenue is the National Garden, and for its first eighty years or so it was nobody's garden but the queen's. The bus passes this stop twice, once now and again after the stadium on the way back toward Syntagma, so if you don't hop off this time, you'll get a second chance.

Queen Amalia, Otto's wife, had it laid out from eighteen thirty-eight behind the new palace. Her German agronomist, Friedrich Schmidt, imported some five hundred species of plants, along with peacocks, ducks and turtles, and a good many of the plants did what northern plants do in an Athenian summer, which is die. What survived became a shady maze of paths, ponds and tall trees, a few degrees cooler than the street. It opened to the public in nineteen twenty-three as the National Garden. The ducks and turtles are still there, and it's still the best place in central Athens to sit in the shade without buying anything.

On its far side is the Zappeion, a neoclassical hall with a curved, colonnaded courtyard, and its story starts with a man named Evangelos Zappas. He fought in the War of Independence, made a fortune in what is now Romania, and spent it on an idea a generation ahead of its time: reviving the Olympic Games. He paid for Olympic contests in Athens in eighteen fifty-nine, and his will funded more, decades before the modern Games began. It also paid for this hall, designed by Theophil Hansen, the Danish architect you'll meet again on this route, and opened in eighteen eighty-eight. When the first modern Olympics came in eighteen ninety-six, the fencing was held here.

Zappas died in Romania in eighteen sixty-five. His body was eventually buried in his home village, but his head was brought here and sealed into a wall of the building he paid for, which is a level of commitment most donors stop short of.

The Zappeion has kept its place in the national story. In May nineteen seventy-nine Greece signed its treaty to join the European Community here, and for the Athens Olympics of two thousand and four it was the press centre. Just beyond the garden, across the road, is the marble stadium, which you'll reach after the museums.

The green wall along the avenue is the National Garden, laid out from eighteen thirty-eight for Queen Amalia, Otto's wife, as the palace's private garden. Her German gardener imported some five hundred kinds of plants, and a good many of them promptly died in the Athenian summer. The public was let in only in nineteen twenty-three. Inside is the Zappeion, a grand hall built for the revival of the Olympic Games, where Greece signed up to join the European Community in nineteen seventy-nine. One of its founders is still in the building, or his head is. And you'll pass this stop again on the way back.

This stretch of Vasilissis Sofias is the city's museum mile, and four museums are within a few minutes' walk of this stop.

The Benaki Museum, in the family mansion of Antonis Benakis, opened in nineteen thirty and covers Greek art and life from prehistory to the twentieth century, including two early paintings by El Greco, who started out as an icon painter on Crete. The Museum of Cycladic Art holds the Goulandris family's collection of marble figures from the Cycladic islands, made around five thousand years ago: folded arms, tilted heads, and faces with nothing but a nose. They look startlingly modern, and the influence runs backwards; artists like Brancusi and Modigliani looked hard at figures like these. The War Museum, opened in nineteen seventy-five in a stark modernist block, runs from ancient armour to the Second World War, with fighter planes and field guns parked outside.

The fourth, the Byzantine and Christian Museum, sits in the Villa Ilissia, built in the eighteen forties for Sophie de Marbois, the Duchess of Plaisance. She was born in Philadelphia, the daughter of a French diplomat, married into the Napoleonic nobility, and came to the new Greece with a great deal of money and very definite opinions. She bought land along the river Ilissos, built herself a villa, and was remembered by a neighbour as dressing all in white and going about with six big white dogs.

The sad heart of her story is her daughter Elisa, who died of pneumonia on a journey to Beirut in the eighteen thirties. The Duchess had her embalmed, brought her back to Athens and kept her in a crypt beneath her house, for years. When the Duchess died in eighteen fifty-four, she was buried with her daughter at her castle on the slopes of Mount Penteli. A metro station on the airport line, Doukissis Plakentias, still carries her name.

Uphill from the avenue is Kolonaki, named after a small ancient column in its square. It's the smart part of town, and its cafés are where Athens comes to be seen nursing a freddo espresso, the iced coffee that Greeks drink for most of the year, slowly, for an hour or more. Above it rises Lycabettus, the tallest hill in the centre, with a white chapel on the summit and a funicular railway for anyone who'd rather not climb.

This stretch of Vasilissis Sofias is the museum mile, with four museums close by. Look for the Benaki in a family mansion, the Museum of Cycladic Art with its marble figures some five thousand years old, the War Museum with old warplanes parked outside, and the Byzantine and Christian Museum, in a villa built for one of the strangest women in nineteenth-century Athens. Uphill is Kolonaki, the smart neighbourhood of cafés and boutiques, and above it Lycabettus, the tallest hill in the centre, with a chapel on top and a funicular railway that saves you the climb.

The long white slab of a hotel is the old Athens Hilton, and when it opened in nineteen sixty-three it was one of the most modern buildings in Greece and the subject of a great deal of argument. Four Greek architects gave the city a big slice of international modernism at a time when Athens was still mostly low-rise, and critics complained that it was far too big for its surroundings. Its defenders pointed to the ends of the building, covered in huge incised marble figures designed by the painter Yannis Moralis, a very Greek signature on a very American hotel. For half a century it was where Athens went for weddings, conferences and cocktails on the roof. It closed in twenty twenty-two for a long rebuild, and reopened in April twenty twenty-six as the Conrad Athens, The Ilisian, with the Moralis marbles kept. The other big hotel by this stop is the Caravel.

Across the avenue is the National Gallery, the country's main collection of Greek painting. It closed for years for a major expansion and reopened in March twenty twenty-one, a day before the two hundredth anniversary of the start of the War of Independence.

It also has the best crime story on this route. In nineteen forty-nine Picasso gave the Greek people a painting of a woman's head, inscribed on the back as a tribute to them, in honour of their resistance in the Second World War. In January twenty twelve, a thief set off the gallery's alarms several times to distract the guard, then came in through a balcony door and took the Picasso, a Mondrian and a small drawing, in a matter of minutes. Nothing was heard of them for nine years. Then, in June twenty twenty-one, police arrested a construction worker and amateur painter, a Picasso enthusiast, who led them to a gorge some forty-five kilometres outside Athens where the paintings were hidden. He told them he'd used the drawing to wipe blood from a cut on his hand and then flushed it down the toilet. It has never been found.

And by Rizari Park lies something far older. In nineteen ninety-six, digging foundations for a new museum of modern art, archaeologists hit the remains of a gymnasium and a wrestling ground. It was the Lyceum, where Aristotle set up his school in three thirty-five BC, in a sanctuary of Apollo. He liked to teach while walking up and down the covered paths, so his followers became known as the Peripatetics, the people who walk about. Logic, biology, ethics, even a project to collect and compare the constitutions of more than a hundred and fifty Greek cities: a surprising amount of the way we still sort knowledge started on these paths. Sulla, our Roman friend from the Temple of Zeus, wrecked the place in eighty-six BC. The art museum went elsewhere, and the foundations are now a small archaeological park, where you can walk up and down exactly as Aristotle did.

The long white slab of a hotel is the old Athens Hilton, opened in nineteen sixty-three and argued about ever since. Look for the huge figures cut into its marble ends, designed by the painter Yannis Moralis; it reopened in twenty twenty-six as the Conrad Athens, The Ilisian. Across the avenue is the National Gallery, which owns a Picasso with a better plot than most thrillers. And by Rizari Park are the excavated foundations of the Lyceum, the school where Aristotle taught, walking as he talked.

This is the Kallimarmaro, the beautiful marble, and it's the only stadium in the world built entirely of marble. Look at the shape: a long, narrow horseshoe, closed at one end, built for running up and down rather than round and round, with bends so tight that a modern sprinter would hate them.

The first stadium here was built by the statesman Lycurgus around three thirty BC, for the games of the Panathenaic festival, with the crowd sitting on the slopes of this little valley. Around one forty AD Herodes Atticus, a fabulously rich Athenian who was also a Roman senator, rebuilt the whole thing in marble from Mount Penteli. He's the same Herodes who built the Odeon under the Acropolis. Over the following centuries the marble was carted off for lime and building stone, and by the eighteen hundreds there was little left but a grassy hollow.

Then came the revival of the Olympics. The site was excavated around eighteen seventy, and for eighteen ninety-six a merchant from Alexandria, George Averoff, paid for the stadium to be rebuilt in fresh Pentelic marble. His statue stands by the entrance. On the sixth of April eighteen ninety-six the first modern Olympic Games opened here, in front of tens of thousands of people.

The race everyone remembers is the marathon, run for the first time from Marathon to this stadium, and the Greeks badly wanted to win it. A Frenchman led for a long way, then an Australian, who collapsed. The winner, in just under three hours, was Spyridon Louis, a water carrier from the village of Marousi, who had stopped on the way at an inn in Pikermi for a glass of wine, or a little cognac, depending on which family story you believe. As he came into the stadium, the Crown Prince and his brother jumped down and ran the last stretch beside him. When the king asked what he would like as a reward, Louis asked for a cart, to help with his water business.

The stadium was used again in two thousand and four, for the archery and as the finish of the Olympic marathon. And every two years, before each summer and winter Games, the Olympic flame is lit at Olympia and carried here, to be handed over to the next host city.

If you'd like your art more recent than the marble, a few minutes' walk into Pangrati is the Basil and Elise Goulandris Foundation, a private museum opened in twenty eighteen, with Cézanne, Van Gogh, Picasso and Giacometti alongside the great Greek modernists.

This is the Kallimarmaro, the beautiful marble, the only stadium in the world built entirely of marble. The first stadium here went up around three thirty BC, and the immensely rich Herodes Atticus rebuilt it in white marble from Mount Penteli. It was dug out and rebuilt again for the first modern Olympic Games in eighteen ninety-six, when a water carrier named Spyridon Louis won the marathon and the crowd went wild. Every Olympic flame still passes through here on its way to the host city.

The three gleaming marble buildings in a row are the Athenian Trilogy: the Academy, the University in the middle, and the National Library. Together they're the clearest statement anywhere of what the new Greek state wanted its capital to be.

When Athens became the capital in eighteen thirty-four, it was a battered little town of a few thousand people, much of it wrecked in the war, with the Acropolis looming over it. Otto's court and its planners set out to build a classical capital almost from scratch, a city that would look like the Athens of Pericles, or at least like northern Europe's idea of it. Much of the design work went to foreign architects, and two of the busiest were Danish brothers.

Christian Hansen designed the University, begun in eighteen thirty-nine and finished in eighteen sixty-four, with a painted frieze in its porch showing King Otto enthroned among the arts and sciences. His younger brother Theophil designed the Academy, begun in eighteen fifty-nine and completed in eighteen eighty-five, and then the National Library, finished in the early nineteen hundreds, which gives this stop its name. Its Doric porch borrows from the Temple of Hephaestus, which you'll see at the Agora, and most of its books moved in twenty eighteen to a new home by the sea at Faliro. Theophil went on to design the Parliament in Vienna, which looks like a close relative of these three.

The Academy is the showpiece. Its columns and porch are modelled on the Erechtheion up on the Acropolis, and it's painted and gilded in places, because by then scholars knew that ancient temples had been brightly coloured, not the pure white of the textbooks. On the tall columns in front stand Athena with her spear and Apollo with his lyre, and seated by the steps are Plato and Socrates, all by the Greek sculptor Leonidas Drosis.

What's worth noticing is who paid. The Academy was funded by Simon Sinas, a banker in Vienna, and the Library by the Vallianos brothers, merchants from Kefalonia. Many of the grandest buildings in Athens were gifts from Greeks who had made their fortunes abroad and sent the money home to help build a country. You've already seen that at the stadium, and you'll see it again at the market.

The street is officially named after Eleftherios Venizelos, the great statesman of the early twentieth century, but nearly every Athenian still calls it Panepistimiou, University Street.

The three gleaming marble buildings in a row are the Athenian Trilogy: the Academy, the University and the National Library. They were designed by two Danish brothers, Christian and Theophil Hansen, and built between the eighteen thirties and the early nineteen hundreds, mostly with money from wealthy Greeks abroad. Look for the two tall columns in front of the Academy, with Athena and Apollo on top, and Plato and Socrates seated by the steps. It's ancient Athens as the nineteenth century imagined it, with fresh paint.

The long neoclassical building behind the gardens is the National Archaeological Museum, and if you only see one museum in Athens, there's a strong case for this one. It has the gold Mask of Agamemnon from Mycenae, which Schliemann dug up in eighteen seventy-six and which turns out to be three or four centuries too old to have belonged to Agamemnon. It has the great bronze god pulled from the sea off Cape Artemision, arm drawn back to throw something that's been lost, so nobody can say for sure whether he's Zeus with a thunderbolt or Poseidon with a trident.

But the thing to find is a battered lump of bronze in a glass case. Around Easter in nineteen hundred, sponge divers from the island of Symi were waiting out the weather off the little island of Antikythera. One of them went down and signalled to be hauled straight back up, babbling about a heap of rotting corpses and horses on the sea floor. They were bronze and marble statues, from a ship that sank in the first century BC. Among the things brought up was a lump of corroded bronze and wood, and two years later an archaeologist noticed a gear wheel in it.

It took most of the twentieth century, and X-ray scanning in two thousand and five, to work out what it was. The Antikythera mechanism was a hand-cranked machine in a wooden case about the size of a shoebox, with dozens of interlocking bronze gears. Turn the handle to a date, and dials showed the sun and moon, the phase of the moon, coming eclipses, and even the four-year cycle of the great athletic games. One gear has a tiny pin riding in a slot to make the moon speed up and slow down, as it really does. Nothing as complicated survives from the next thousand years and more. It even carries inscriptions that work as a user's manual.

Next door is the Polytechnic, the national technical university, with a very different story. In November nineteen seventy-three, under the military dictatorship that had ruled Greece since nineteen sixty-seven, students occupied the campus, built a radio transmitter from lab equipment and broadcast across Athens: This is the Polytechnic. Thousands gathered outside. In the early hours of the seventeenth of November a tank smashed through the main gate. At least two dozen people were killed in those days. The junta fell the following summer. The twisted gate is kept on the campus, and every seventeenth of November the city marches from here to remember.

The long neoclassical building behind the gardens is the National Archaeological Museum, one of the great museums of the ancient world. Inside is the Antikythera mechanism, a shoebox-sized bronze computer full of gears, found in a shipwreck in nineteen-oh-one and built more than two thousand years ago to predict eclipses and track the heavens. Next door is the Polytechnic, where in November nineteen seventy-three students rose against the military dictatorship, until a tank came through the gate.

This is Omonia, which means concord, and the name tells you more about hopes than about history.

When the planners laid out the new capital in the eighteen thirties, this was meant to be the site of the royal palace, at the head of a grand street running down toward the Acropolis. The palace went to Syntagma instead, and this became just a square, named first for the palace it didn't get and then for King Otto. In eighteen sixty-two, the year Otto was sent packing, it was renamed Omonia, after the leaders of rival political factions, whose quarrels had spilled into bloodshed, met here and swore an oath of reconciliation. It's been a hopeful name ever since. For most of the century and a half since, Omonia has been where Athens comes to protest, to celebrate, and to change trains.

Underneath you is one of the busiest metro stations in the city. The old railway to Piraeus was brought underground here between the wars, and the modern lines cross it, so if you've used the metro at all today you've probably passed through. The square above has been redesigned more times than anyone can count, most recently in twenty twenty, when its big fountain came back.

This is also a good place to notice a very Athenian institution, the periptero, the street kiosk. The first ones appeared around nineteen eleven, and the permits went to wounded war veterans, a way to earn a living instead of a pension. They grew into tiny, astonishingly well-stocked shops: newspapers, cigarettes, water, ice cream, chargers, aspirin, bus tickets and, if you ask nicely, directions. Many stay open late, some all night, and the owner usually knows everything that happens on the street.

Omonia has had hard years, and it's still rougher around the edges than Syntagma. But this is where you see Athens at work rather than on display: market porters, office workers, students, newcomers from half the world, all crossing the same square. If you hop off here, the old streets toward the market are full of cheap places to eat and shops that sell one thing only, whether that's buttons, olive oil or hunting knives.

This is Omonia, which means concord. It got the name in eighteen sixty-two, when the leaders of feuding political factions met here and swore to stop fighting, and it's been a hopeful name ever since. The square was first meant to hold the royal palace, which went to Syntagma instead. Today Omonia is the working heart of the city, a big circle over one of the busiest metro stations, with cheap hotels, phone shops and the periptera, the street kiosks that sell everything from newspapers to phone chargers.

This square is named after Georgios Karaiskakis, and of all the heroes of the War of Independence he may be the most human.

He was born in seventeen eighty-two, the illegitimate son of a nun, and nobody ever let him forget it; the nun's son is what people called him. He grew up a brigand and a soldier of fortune, served in the guard of the Ottoman strongman Ali Pasha as a young man, and was quick-tempered, foul-mouthed, often ill with tuberculosis, and at one point tried for treason. Then, when the revolution was close to collapse, he turned out to be the best field commander it had.

In eighteen twenty-six an Ottoman army besieged the Acropolis, with Greek fighters holding out on the rock. Karaiskakis spent the winter fighting a brilliant campaign in the mountains of central Greece, then came down to the coast at Faliro to break the siege. On the twenty-second of April eighteen twenty-seven he was shot in a skirmish, and he died the next day, the feast of St George, his name day. Without him the relief effort fell apart, and the Acropolis surrendered a few weeks later. The football stadium in Piraeus, home of Olympiakos, carries his name and stands near where he fell.

The neighbourhood around you is Metaxourgeio, which means the silk mill. The big building that gave it the name was designed by Christian Hansen, the architect of the University, and ran as a silk factory from eighteen fifty-five until cheap Chinese silk put it out of business twenty years later. It's now the Municipal Gallery of Athens. The area went through hard decades and has come back as a district of artists, small theatres and cheap, good places to eat.

A few streets south is the Kerameikos, the potters' quarter, which gives us the word ceramic. It was also the great cemetery of ancient Athens, outside the main city gate, where the Sacred Way set off for Eleusis. Pericles gave his famous funeral speech for the war dead in the public cemetery out here, the speech quoted on the tomb in Syntagma. And in the bed of a little stream nearby, archaeologists found more than eight thousand ostraka, bits of broken pottery scratched with names: the ballots Athenians used to vote a politician into exile, which you'll hear about at Monastiraki.

This square is named after Georgios Karaiskakis, one of the great commanders of the War of Independence, nicknamed the nun's son, because his mother was a nun. He was mortally wounded in April eighteen twenty-seven trying to break the siege of the Acropolis, and died on his name day. The neighbourhood is Metaxourgeio, the silk mill, after a factory nearby that is now the city's art gallery. Just to the south lies the Kerameikos, the potters' quarter and the great cemetery of ancient Athens.

There are two stops here, Thissio first and then Monastiraki, and between them lies the heart of ancient Athens. Thissio is named after the temple on the low hill above the Agora, which people long mistook for a shrine of Theseus, and the pedestrian walk along its edge has some of the best views of the Acropolis in the city.

Monastiraki is a good place to see how many cities Athens has been. On the square is a small mosque built in seventeen fifty-nine by an Ottoman governor who was said to have burned an ancient column into lime for the building. When plague broke out that year, the Athenians blamed the sacrilege, and he was dismissed. Behind it are the walls of Hadrian's Library, built by the same emperor as the Temple of Zeus, and beyond the railway lies the Ancient Agora.

The Agora was a marketplace, but it was also where democracy did its daily work, and the surprising thing is how little of it involved elections. Athens filled most of its offices by lot. The council of five hundred that ran the city's business was chosen by lot, for a year. Juries, often hundreds strong, were picked by lot on the morning of the trial, using a stone allotment machine called a kleroterion, with rows of slots for citizens' name tokens and a tube that dropped black and white balls to decide which rows would serve. The idea was simple: you can't bribe a jury, or build a political dynasty, if nobody knows who will be chosen. A piece of one of these machines is in the museum here.

Then there was ostracism. Once a year the assembly voted on whether to hold one. If it did, citizens came here and scratched a name on a piece of broken pot, an ostrakon, and if at least six thousand votes were cast, the man with the most was sent away for ten years. He kept his property and came back with full rights. It wasn't a punishment so much as a cooling-off period for the whole political system. Plutarch tells of Aristides, nicknamed the Just, who was asked by a farmer who couldn't write to scratch a name on his shard for him. The name was Aristides. Asked what Aristides had done to him, the farmer said, nothing, I don't even know him, I'm just sick of hearing him called the Just. Aristides wrote his own name and handed it back.

On the low hill at the far side stands the Temple of Hephaestus, god of the metalworkers, one of the best preserved temples in the Greek world, because for centuries it was a church. Along the east side runs the Stoa of Attalos, a long two-storey colonnade that a king of Pergamon gave the city, rebuilt by the American School of Classical Studies in the nineteen fifties to house the Agora museum. And just north of the square, the lanes of Psyrri are where Athens goes out at night.

The bus stops first at Thissio and then at Monastiraki, with its flea market, its souvlaki and a little Ottoman mosque on the square. Between the two lies the Ancient Agora, the marketplace and civic heart of classical Athens, where Socrates argued, juries were picked by machine, and citizens scratched names on pottery to send their politicians into exile. Look for the Temple of Hephaestus on its low hill, one of the best preserved Greek temples anywhere, and the long two-storey Stoa of Attalos, rebuilt in the nineteen fifties as the Agora's museum.

Along Athinas Street is the Varvakeios, the Central Market, which Athenians call the stomach of the city. It was built between eighteen seventy-eight and eighteen eighty-six, held up by a fire along the way, under a long roof of iron and glass, and it has been trading ever since. During the dictatorship of the late nineteen sixties and seventies there was a plan to knock it down for a tower block, and it survived that too.

Inside, the meat hall is a long avenue of hanging carcasses and shouting butchers, and the fish market beside it is a wet, gleaming hall of ice and scales, with prices called at the top of the voice. Across the street the fruit and vegetables take over, and the side streets, Evripidou especially, are full of spice shops, nut roasters, cheese sellers and delicatessens, some of them more than a century old. It's open every day but Sunday, and mornings are best.

The market is named after Ioannis Varvakis, who has one of the great life stories on this route. He was born on the island of Psara in seventeen forty-five and had his own ship by his late teens. In seventeen seventy, fighting with the Russian fleet against the Ottomans, he turned his ship into a fireship and sent it blazing into the enemy line. He went on to St Petersburg, where Catherine the Great gave him a naval commission and fishing rights on the Caspian Sea, and he made an enormous fortune from caviar. He left money for a free school in Athens, the Varvakeion, which stood across the street from the market, and the market carries his name too. In eighteen eighty, in a Roman house near the school, excavators found a small marble copy of the great gold and ivory Athena that stood inside the Parthenon. It's now in the National Archaeological Museum, and it's the best idea anyone has of what she looked like.

The market isn't just for looking at. There are tavernas in and around it that have fed market workers for generations, and you'll hear about them in the final clip.

Across Athinas is Kotzia Square. City Hall, from the eighteen seventies, stands on one side, and the National Bank, founded in eighteen forty-one, on another. In the middle, behind a fence, is a stretch of ancient road with graves alongside it, from just outside one of the old city gates, uncovered when the square was excavated and left open to view. In Athens you can't dig a hole for anything without running into the past.

Along Athinas Street is the Varvakeios, the Central Market, built in the eighteen eighties under a roof of iron and glass. The meat and fish halls are inside, loud and wet and open every day but Sunday, with fruit, vegetables, spices and cheese spilling into the streets around. Across the road is Kotzia Square, with City Hall on one side and the National Bank on another, and in the middle a fenced-off stretch of ancient road and graves, found when the square was dug up. In Athens, every hole has a history.

If you're hopping off to eat, here's how Athens does it, and a few places that have been doing it for a long time. Hours change, so it's always worth checking the door.

The city's fast food is souvlaki. Ask for a pitta souvlaki and you get grilled meat, usually pork, wrapped in warm flatbread with tomato, onion and tzatziki, for a few euros, eaten standing up. Gyros, sliced from the turning stack, comes the same way. The classic place to try it is around Monastiraki Square, at the bottom of Mitropoleos Street. Bairaktaris, on the square itself, has been a taverna since eighteen seventy-nine, and Thanasis, a few doors away, is famous for its kebab, minced meat grilled on a skewer and served with flatbread, onion and parsley. Near Syntagma, Kostas, a tiny counter on Pentelis Street, traces its souvlaki back to nineteen fifty.

Breakfast is often eaten on the move. Look for the carts selling koulouri, rings of bread crusted with sesame, which are cheap and best early. Bakeries sell bougatsa, custard or cheese wrapped in filo, served warm with icing sugar and cinnamon. For pies, Ariston on Voulis Street, near Syntagma, has been baking since nineteen ten, and its cheese pie in buttery pastry has fed generations of politicians.

For something sweet, Krinos on Aiolou Street, near the market, has been frying loukoumades since nineteen twenty-three: little puffs of dough soaked in honey and dusted with cinnamon, in a room with mosaic floors and marble tables that hasn't changed much since. Near Omonia, on Marikas Kotopouli Street, the old dairy bar Stani has been serving thick sheep's milk yogurt with honey since nineteen thirty-one.

Then there are the market tavernas, the best lunch on this route if you don't mind paper tablecloths. Inside the Central Market, Epirus serves pots of the day's stews and soups, including patsas, the tripe soup that market workers swear by and that Athenians swear cures a hangover. Just behind the market on Sokratous Street is Diporto, down a few steps in a basement. There's no real menu, the wine comes from the barrel, and you eat whatever is cooking that day: chickpeas, a salad, fried fish. It's been there for well over a century, and the poet Kostas Varnalis put it in a poem.

To drink, try retsina, white wine flavoured with pine resin, which goes surprisingly well with fried fish, or an ouzo with a small plate of meze; it turns cloudy when you add water. And as everywhere in Greece, nobody brings the bill until you ask for it. Kali orexi. Enjoy your meal.

Athens runs on souvlaki: grilled pork in warm pitta with tomato, onion and tzatziki. Around Monastiraki Square, Bairaktaris has been feeding people since eighteen seventy-nine, and Thanasis nearby is famous for its kebab. For breakfast on the move, buy a sesame koulouri from a street cart. For something sweet, Krinos on Aiolou Street has been frying loukoumades, little honey-soaked doughnuts, since nineteen twenty-three. And by the Central Market, Diporto and Epirus are the old market tavernas: simple, cheap and very good.

Welcome aboard, and settle in. This is Syntagma, which means Constitution. The square is named for a September night in eighteen forty-three, when Athenians and soldiers gathered under the palace windows and asked the king for a constitution, and got one. Ever since, this has been the city's front room. People arrange to meet here, cut across it on the way to work, sit by the fountain with a paper cup of iced coffee, and come back to it in their thousands whenever something matters, whether it's a celebration or a worry they want to share.

The long, pale building across the avenue is the Parliament. It was built in the eighteen thirties and forties as a home for King Otto and Queen Amalia, the first royal household of modern Greece, and behind it lies the garden the queen planted, which you'll pass a little later on the loop.

In front of the Parliament, look for the guards at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. They're the Evzones, young men doing their national service, and their uniform is a small museum of handcraft. The white kilt, the fustanella, takes around thirty metres of cloth and is said to have four hundred pleats. The red leather shoes, the tsarouchia, have a black pompom on the toe and weigh about three kilos each, with dozens of nails in the sole that ring on the marble as the guards march. All of it is still cut and sewn by hand, by a small team of tailors and embroiderers who work for the guard.

Every hour the guards change, with slow, swinging steps that look almost like a dance. Watch for the soldier who walks alongside them between moves and quietly straightens a tassel or a collar, much as a parent might tidy a child before the school photograph.

Under the square is the metro station, and when it was dug in the nineteen nineties, archaeologists found layers of the old city beneath it. Some of what they found is on show by the ticket barriers, behind glass, so Athenians pass a few thousand years of their own history on the way to work.

The full loop takes about an hour and a half if you stay aboard. Along the way, this track tells you less about battles and more about the people who lived here, then and now: who wove and who cooked, who sold coffee on the corner, and who planted the trees you'll be glad of in the afternoon.

Welcome aboard. This is Syntagma, Constitution Square, and for Athenians it's the city's front room: the place you arrange to meet, cut across on the way to work, and come back to when something matters. The long, pale building across the avenue is the Parliament, which began life as the home of the young king and queen. In front of it, look for the guards in white pleated kilts. Every part of their uniform, down to the nailed red shoes, is still made by hand by the guard's own tailors.

This is Makrygianni, a neighbourhood of apartment blocks, bakeries and small hotels at the foot of the Acropolis, and it's named for a man whose story is a gentle one to begin with. Yannis Makrygiannis was a hero of the Greek War of Independence in the eighteen twenties. He grew up poor, never went to school, and couldn't read or write. Then, in his early thirties, he taught himself, slowly, letter by letter, because he wanted to write down what he had lived through in his own words. His memoirs, written in the plain spoken Greek of a villager, are now treasured as one of the great works of modern Greek prose.

Up the slope is Plaka, the oldest continuously lived-in part of the city. Its lanes are lined with nineteenth-century houses with tiled roofs and wooden shutters, courtyards full of pots of basil and geraniums, and old churches so small they'd fit inside a living room.

Above Plaka, right under the north face of the rock, is a pocket of whitewashed houses that looks as if someone had set a Cycladic village down in the middle of Athens. In a way, someone did. When Athens became the capital in the eighteen thirties, the new kingdom needed builders, and many came from the islands. A good number came from Anafi, a small island just east of Santorini that was known for its masons. They worked on the king's palace by day, and they needed somewhere to live.

The story goes that they made use of an old custom: if you could raise a house and put a roof on it between sunset and sunrise, it couldn't simply be pulled down in the morning. So they built by night, the way they built at home, in small white cubes with steps for streets, and they called the place Anafiotika, little Anafi. About forty-five of the houses remain, and some are still home to descendants of those first island families.

If you walk up there, go quietly. The lanes are so narrow you'll brush the walls, and the doors you pass are people's front doors. You'll soon meet the other residents: the cats, asleep on warm steps and in flowerpots. They're fed by neighbours and by volunteers who look after the cats of the whole Acropolis area, and they seem to know it.

This neighbourhood is named for General Makrygiannis, a hero of the War of Independence who never went to school, and who taught himself to write as a grown man so he could set down his story in his own words. Up the slope is Plaka, the oldest lived-in part of Athens. Above it, tucked right under the Acropolis, are the little white houses of Anafiotika, built in the eighteen forties by stonemasons from the island of Anafi, who came to work on the king's new palace.

As you pass the museum, look for the glass set into the ground in front of it. Through it, and under the building itself, you can see an Athenian neighbourhood that was found when the foundations were dug: streets, houses, workshops and bathhouses, lived in from the age of the Parthenon into Byzantine times. There are wells and drains and kitchen floors, the ordinary bones of daily life. The museum was raised on pillars so the neighbourhood could stay where it was, and visitors can now walk down among the houses themselves.

On the first floor stand five young women in marble. They're the Caryatids, although the ancient building accounts simply call them the korai, the maidens. They once held up the roof of a small porch on the Acropolis, carrying it on their heads as calmly as if it were a basket. If you go in, look at their hair. Each has her own arrangement of braids, with a thick plait down the back that also strengthens the neck, where the stone is weakest. Each once held a shallow bowl for offerings.

They were brought indoors in nineteen seventy-nine to protect them from the city's air, and between twenty eleven and twenty fifteen conservators cleaned them very gently with a specially built laser, while visitors watched. There were six. The sixth was taken to Britain in the early eighteen hundreds and stands in the British Museum.

On the top floor, the glass gallery is turned to line up with the Parthenon, which you can see through its windows. Around the walls runs the frieze, the long band of carving that shows the procession to honour Athena. Where the original pieces are in London, there are pale plaster copies, so the gaps are plain to see.

Those gaps were the cause of Melina Mercouri's life. She was a film star first, famous around the world after Never on Sunday in nineteen sixty, then a campaigner against the military dictatorship, and from nineteen eighty-one Greece's first woman Minister of Culture. In July nineteen eighty-two, at a UNESCO conference in Mexico City, she asked formally for the marbles to come home, and the delegates gave her a long ovation. She argued for years for a new museum, a home ready to receive them. She died in nineteen ninety-four and never saw this building, which opened in twenty oh nine. Many Athenians still think of the empty spaces upstairs as hers.

Under the museum, beneath glass, lies an ordinary Athenian neighbourhood of streets, houses, workshops and baths, lived in for well over a thousand years. Upstairs stand five of the six marble maidens, the Caryatids, who once carried a porch roof on the Acropolis on their heads. The sixth is in London. On the top floor, the Parthenon sculptures are laid out with pale copies for the pieces still in the British Museum, which the actress and minister Melina Mercouri spent years asking to bring home.

This is where many people step off for the walk up to the Acropolis. Up on the rock, the Parthenon is the building everyone photographs, but the one that mattered most to everyday worship was the smaller temple beside it, the Erechtheion, with the porch of the maidens. Inside it stood Athena's oldest and holiest image, a statue carved from olive wood. An olive tree grows beside it today, planted in modern times where Athena's own tree was said to stand.

At Athena's great summer festival, the Panathenaia, the city brought that old statue a gift: a new robe, a peplos, woven from wool. And the making of it was women's work from start to finish. About nine months before the festival, at another feast, two young girls called the arrephoroi, somewhere between seven and eleven years old, helped the priestess set up the threads on the loom. These girls were chosen from Athenian families to live up on the Acropolis for a year, and we're told they even had a special place up there to play ball. The weaving itself was taken on by women of the city, called the ergastinai, the workers, both young girls and older women.

When the robe was finished, it was carried through the city in a great procession and up the rock. In the museum, at the very centre of the carved frieze, there's a quiet scene of a cloth being folded, which many people take to be that same robe.

The paths you'll walk on here were made with the same kind of patient handwork. Between nineteen fifty-four and nineteen fifty-seven, the architect Dimitris Pikionis worked with his students and local stonemasons, with hardly any drawings, to lay the paths up towards the Acropolis and across Philopappou Hill. They used stones and pieces of marble saved from old Athenian houses that were being pulled down, and fitted them into the hillside like a patchwork quilt. It's worth looking down as you walk.

Philopappou Hill is also where Athenians come to play. On Clean Monday, the first day of Lent, families climb up with picnics and homemade kites, and the sky over the hill fills with them. On summer evenings, people come up simply for the light, to watch the marble turn gold and then rose as the sun goes down. On the next low hill, the Pnyx, the men of the ancient assembly once met to vote. Their wives and daughters weren't among them, but the city those men argued over was fed and clothed, and its goddess dressed, by the women at home.

Up on the rock, beside the Parthenon, Athena's oldest statue was carved from olive wood, and at her great festival the city brought her a gift that women made: a new woven robe. Young girls, chosen to live on the Acropolis for a year, helped set up the loom, and women of the city wove it. Down here, the stone paths up the hills were laid by hand in the nineteen fifties. And on Clean Monday each spring, Philopappou Hill fills with families flying kites.

Look for the tall columns standing in a wide field of grass and stone. This is the Temple of Olympian Zeus. It was begun by the city's rulers in the sixth century before Christ and finished by the Roman emperor Hadrian about six hundred and forty years later, which may make any unfinished projects at home feel a little less overdue. Of more than a hundred columns, fifteen still stand, and one more lies on the ground, just as a storm blew it down in eighteen fifty-two.

For centuries after it stopped being a temple, people simply lived around it, and for a time someone lived on top of it. Hermits called stylites, who chose to live on top of pillars to be nearer to God, set up a small hut on the stone beam across two of the columns, high above the ground. Athenians still remembered the last of them in the eighteen hundreds. One old Athenian recalled being taken there as a child to bring the hermit gifts of bread and fruit, which he gathered in by letting down a basket on a rope. The hut was finally taken down in eighteen seventy.

Just beyond the temple, the little Ilissos river once ran, though it's mostly hidden under the streets now. A spring on its bank, called Kallirrhoe, the beautiful stream, gave the water that Athenian brides were bathed in before their weddings, a custom the historian Thucydides still knew. It's easy to imagine women coming down here with water jars on the morning of a wedding, talking over the plans.

The arch by the road was put up in Hadrian's time, where the old town met the new quarter. On one side, its inscription says, this is Athens, the ancient city of Theseus, and on the other, this is the city of Hadrian, and not of Theseus. It's not so different from a sign on the edge of a town, telling you which neighbourhood you're in.

Opposite the arch, by the roadside, look for a marble bust in a small garden. That's Melina Mercouri, whom you met at the museum, unveiled here in nineteen ninety-nine, a few years after her death. She sits beside one of the busiest roads in the city, with the Acropolis she campaigned for not far behind her.

The tall columns ahead belong to the Temple of Olympian Zeus, which took about six hundred and forty years to finish. Long after its gods had gone, people went on living around it, and for a while, on top of it. Until the eighteen hundreds, hermits lived in a little hut on the stone beam across two of the columns, and Athenians brought them bread and fruit, which they pulled up in a basket on a rope. Opposite the arch, look for a marble bust in a small garden: that's Melina Mercouri.

Behind the railings and the tall trees is the National Garden, and it began with one young woman. Amalia of Oldenburg was still a teenager when she married King Otto, and she arrived in Athens in eighteen thirty-seven to find a small, dusty town with hardly a tree to sit under. From eighteen thirty-eight she set about making a garden behind the palace. A German gardener, Friedrich Schmidt, brought in more than five hundred kinds of plants, along with peacocks, ducks and turtles. The queen is said to have spent hours there every day, and she had a favourite rock where she liked to sit.

Amalia loved to ride and to dance, and Athenians grew used to seeing her on horseback around the town. She also put together a court dress drawn from Greek folk costume, with an embroidered jacket, a long silk skirt and a little cap, and it caught on so well that the Amalia, as it's still called, became one of the national costumes of Greek women, worn today at festivals and parades. In eighteen sixty-two the king and queen were made to leave Greece, and she never came back. Her garden stayed.

In the twentieth century it was opened to everyone and renamed the National Garden, and now it's the city's shared back garden. Grandparents push prams along the shady paths, office workers eat lunch on the benches, and children feed the ducks on the pond and hunt for turtles sunning themselves on the stones. Cats doze under the hedges, keeping a polite eye on the ducks. On a hot afternoon it's noticeably cooler under the trees than out on the avenue.

At the far side of the garden is the Zappeion, a grand hall with a curved colonnade, opened in eighteen eighty-eight. During the first modern Olympics, in eighteen ninety-six, it was the fencing hall, and in twenty oh four it was the press centre. In May nineteen seventy-nine, Greece signed its way into the European Community in its marble courtyard.

Nearby, among the trees, is Aigli, one of the oldest open-air cinemas in the city. On a summer night, a deckchair, the smell of jasmine and a film under the stars are a very Athenian way to end a hot day, and it all happens in a garden that a young queen planted nearly two centuries ago.

Behind the railings is the National Garden, which began as Queen Amalia's own garden behind the palace in eighteen thirty-eight. She brought hundreds of kinds of plants to a dry, dusty town, and is said to have spent hours here every day. Today it belongs to everyone: grandparents with prams, office workers on benches at lunchtime, ducks and turtles on the pond, and plenty of cats. In summer it's noticeably cooler than the avenue, so if you hop off, it's a good place to catch your breath.

This stretch of Vasilissis Sofias is sometimes called the museum mile, and some of its museums began very close to home. The Benaki Museum, on the corner of Koumbari Street, was the house of the Benakis family. Antonis Benakis, a collector who grew up in Alexandria in Egypt, gave the house and his collections to the nation, and it opened as a museum in April nineteen thirty-one.

His younger sister, Penelope Delta, became one of the best-loved children's writers in Greece. In nineteen thirty-two she published a book about him called Trelantonis, Crazy Antonis, full of his childhood mischief in Alexandria, climbing, breaking things and leading his brothers and sisters into trouble. Generations of Greek children have grown up with it, so for many visitors the serious collector who founded the museum is also the naughty boy from a favourite book.

Inside, the rooms of folk costume and embroidery are among the most moving in the city. Before machines, almost every girl in a Greek village learned to spin, weave and embroider, and for years she worked on the linens, cushions and clothes for her dowry. Each region had its own patterns and colours, so a woman's dress told you where she came from, whether she was married, and how skilled her hands were. These were clothes for working and clothes for weddings, mended carefully and handed down.

Close by, the Museum of Cycladic Art grew out of the collection of Nicholas and Dolly Goulandris, and opened in nineteen eighty-six. Its small marble figures from the Aegean islands are between four and five thousand years old. Most are women, standing with their arms folded across their bodies, so simple and calm they look almost modern. Nobody knows quite what they meant to the people who made them.

Up the slope is Kolonaki, a neighbourhood of small shops, galleries and cafés, where Athenians are quite happy to make one freddo espresso last all afternoon while they watch the street go by. Nobody will hurry you. Above it all rises Lycabettus, the highest hill in the city, with the little white chapel of Saint George on top. A small funicular railway runs up inside the hill, and at sunset the whole city spreads out beneath you, white and gold, all the way to the sea.

This stretch of avenue is lined with museums, and one of them was once a family's home. The Benaki Museum opened in nineteen thirty-one in the Benakis family mansion, and its folk costumes and embroidery show the patient handwork of generations of Greek women. Up the slope is Kolonaki, where Athenians can happily make a single iced coffee last all afternoon. Above it rises Lycabettus, the highest hill in the city, with a little white chapel on its summit.

The long white hotel here opened in nineteen sixty-three as the Athens Hilton, the first big international hotel of its kind in the city. Plenty of Athenians disliked it at first, a modern block rising so close to the classical skyline, but it soon became part of the city's life, the place for a special night out, and recently it has reopened under a new name.

Look at its broad end walls. The painter Yiannis Moralis designed a pair of enormous reliefs for them, carved line by line into about five hundred and twenty marble slabs. In them you can find Athena, the sun, an olive tree and an owl, a ship, musicians playing pipes, and young women carrying baskets on their heads, the offering-bearers of the ancient processions, here to welcome travellers instead of gods.

Across the avenue is the National Gallery, which also carries the name of Alexandros Soutsos, the collector who left his paintings and his fortune to the nation. It reopened in March twenty twenty-one, for the two hundredth anniversary of Greek independence, after eight years of rebuilding. The painter Georgios Iakovidis, who was the gallery's first curator, is loved for his pictures of children and family life, above all one called Children's Concert, painted around nineteen hundred, in which a group of small children make music on toy instruments with enormous seriousness. Many of the Greek painters of the eighteen hundreds turned in the same way to everyday life: village customs, harbours, portraits of their neighbours, and the clear, strong light that anyone who has spent a day in Athens will recognise.

Beside the gallery, Rizari Park is a small green square where people walk their dogs, sit with a book, or wait for a bus in the shade. A little further along is the Megaron, the city's great concert hall, where Athenians dress up for an evening of music and spill out afterwards into the warm night to talk it over at a café.

If you have time to step inside the gallery, it's a good antidote to the marble: a chance to see how Greeks have painted themselves, their homes and their children, in the years since the country became independent.

The big white hotel here opened in nineteen sixty-three as the Athens Hilton, and on its broad end walls the painter Yiannis Moralis carved huge figures into the marble: Athena, an olive tree and an owl, musicians with pipes, and women carrying baskets of offerings on their heads. Across the avenue is the National Gallery, which reopened in twenty twenty-one after eight years of work. Many of its best-loved paintings are scenes of ordinary Greek life, from children at play to the light on the countryside.

The horseshoe of white marble is the Panathenaic Stadium, which Athenians call the Kallimarmaro, the beautiful marble. There was a stadium here in ancient times for the games of Athena's festival, and in the eighteen nineties it was rebuilt in gleaming marble for the first modern Olympic Games, held here in the spring of eighteen ninety-six.

The race everyone remembers is the marathon, run from the town of Marathon to this stadium. It was won by a young man named Spyridon Louis, from the village of Marousi north of the city. He was a water carrier. His father sold water in Athens, and Spyridon helped bring it in. The story goes that he even stopped along the way for a glass of wine. When he came into the stadium first, the crowd went wild. Afterwards the king asked what he would like as a reward, and Louis asked for a small cart and a donkey, to make the water round easier. He never raced again, and went home to a quiet life in Marousi. The main Olympic stadium of twenty oh four, which stands there today, carries his name.

Women weren't allowed to compete in eighteen ninety-six at all. But the day after the men's race, a woman named Stamata Revithi set off alone from Marathon and ran the whole course, in about five and a half hours. She had people sign their names to say when she started and finished, so that no one could doubt her. When she reached the stadium she wasn't allowed in, so she finished outside. We know very little about the rest of her life. Today women run this course in their thousands.

The stadium is still part of the city's routine. Early in the morning, before the visitors arrive, you can buy a ticket to jog around the track, and many Athenians walk or run on the paths around the outside at dawn and dusk. Every November, the Athens Marathon follows the old route and finishes here, and runners of every age come in, tired and beaming, to the cheers of families up in the marble seats.

And each time the Olympic Games come round, the flame that's been lit at ancient Olympia is handed over on this track to the next host city, so for a moment the whole world's eyes turn to a stadium where a water carrier once won the day.

Athenians call this the Kallimarmaro, the beautiful marble. It hosted the first modern Olympics in eighteen ninety-six, and the marathon was won by Spyridon Louis, a water carrier from the village of Marousi, who asked the king for nothing more than a cart and a donkey for his work. The day after, a woman named Stamata Revithi ran the same course on her own, and had to finish outside, because she wasn't allowed in. Today Athenians jog around it in the early morning.

This avenue is officially called Eleftheriou Venizelou, but everyone knows it as Panepistimiou, University Street. Look for three white buildings side by side, often called the Trilogy. The University in the middle was designed by the Danish architect Christian Hansen and begun in eighteen thirty-nine, and the Academy and the National Library on either side were designed by his younger brother, Theophil. For a new country where many people couldn't read, these were buildings of hope, a promise that the children of farmers and sailors could come and study here. If you can, look up at the University's porch, where there's a long painted frieze in soft colours.

For most of the eighteen hundreds that promise was made to boys. Girls might go to school, but few people expected them to go further. Then, in eighteen eighty-seven, a teacher and writer named Kallirroi Parren started a weekly paper called the Ladies' Newspaper, written and run by women. Its first issue sold out. Week after week it argued, patiently and persistently, that women should be able to study at every level and to earn their own living.

In eighteen ninety, the University accepted its first woman student, Ioanna Stefanopoli, at the School of Philosophy. In eighteen ninety-three, two sisters, Angeliki and Alexandra Panagiotatou, were admitted to the medical school, and in eighteen ninety-seven Angeliki became the first woman to graduate from it. Not everyone welcomed them, and it took real courage simply to walk up those steps each morning. Angeliki went on to a long career as a doctor and a teacher of medicine.

Today the steps are full of students again, waiting for friends, arguing, and sharing a koulouri, the ring of bread crusted with sesame that's sold from carts on almost every corner of the city. The National Library has moved its books to a new home by the sea, but the old building with its grand staircase still stands as Theophil Hansen designed it.

So as you pass, you might picture a young woman in the eighteen nineties, books held tight, climbing those marble steps for the first time while the whole street watched, and making it a little easier for everyone who came after her.

Along this avenue stand three white neoclassical buildings, the Academy, the University and the old National Library, built in the eighteen hundreds as the young Greek state's statement of faith in learning. For decades, though, those doors opened mainly to men. In eighteen ninety the University accepted its first woman student, Ioanna Stefanopoli, and in eighteen ninety-three two sisters, Angeliki and Alexandra Panagiotatou, began to study medicine here.

The long neoclassical building behind its gardens is the National Archaeological Museum, which holds treasures from all over Greece. It's easy to be dazzled by the gold, but walk a little further and you start to meet people.

Upstairs is a room of wall paintings from Akrotiri on Santorini, the town that was buried by an eruption about thirty-six hundred years ago. They were painted on the walls of people's houses. In one room, red lilies grow out of rocky hills while swallows swoop between them, some meeting in mid-air. In another, two small boys, each with a single boxing glove, spar with tremendous seriousness. Whoever lived in those rooms woke up every morning to spring flowers and children at play.

Downstairs are the carved gravestones of Classical Athens, and they're tender rather than sad. One of the loveliest belongs to a woman named Hegeso, from about four hundred years before Christ, and it was found in the old cemetery at Kerameikos. She sits on a chair with her feet on a footstool, while a young servant girl holds out an open jewellery box. Hegeso has lifted out a piece of jewellery and is looking at it, as she must have done on a thousand ordinary mornings. Her family chose to remember her like that, at home and unhurried.

In the great bronze hall, look for a small boy, perhaps ten years old, riding a galloping horse, leaning forward with his face set in concentration. He was found in pieces in the sea off Cape Artemision, and has been patiently put back together. He may be the most alive thing in the building.

Next door is the old Polytechnic, the university for engineers. In November nineteen seventy-three, under the military dictatorship, students occupied it and broadcast calls for freedom from a small radio station, until the gate was forced open in the early hours of the seventeenth. Lives were lost in those days. Every year around that date, Athenians come in their thousands to lay red flowers on the old iron gate, and schools mark the day. It's a quiet, steady kind of remembering, and the gate is kept just as it was.

This is the National Archaeological Museum, one of the great museums of the world. Among the gold and the famous bronzes, look for the small, human things: a little boy riding a galloping horse, a gravestone where a woman picks a necklace from her jewellery box, and bright wall paintings from the buried town of Akrotiri on Santorini, with swallows over red lilies and two small boys boxing. Next door is the Polytechnic, where every November people lay red flowers at the old iron gate.

Omonia means concord, or harmony, which is a hopeful name for one of the busiest squares in Athens. It's a crossroads of avenues, metro lines and buses, and for well over a century it's been where newcomers first met the city. People from villages all over Greece stepped off here looking for work. Later came people from Albania and Africa, Pakistan and Bangladesh and the Middle East, and the streets around still hum with their shops, their food and their languages.

The largest arrival of all came after nineteen twenty-two. When the war in Asia Minor ended in defeat, Greeks whose families had lived for generations along the Turkish coast and inland, in cities like Smyrna, had to leave, and the following year a treaty made the exchange of populations official. Around one point two million refugees came to a country of about five million people, most of them women, children and the elderly. Athens took them in wherever it could, in schools, churches and warehouses, and even in the boxes of the old Municipal Theatre, a few streets from here.

Over the following years, they built whole new neighbourhoods on the edges of the city and named them after the places they had lost: Nea Smyrni, New Smyrna, and Nea Ionia, and Nea Filadelfeia. They brought their trades and their spices, dishes like the cumin-scented meatballs called soutzoukakia, and the music that became rebetiko, the Greek blues, sung in small cafés late at night. Within a generation they were simply part of what it means to be Athenian, and a great many families here have a grandmother from Asia Minor, and her recipes.

On the corners, look for the kiosks, the periptera. The first appeared around nineteen eleven, and before long licences to run them were given to men wounded in the wars, in place of a pension. A widow or a child could inherit the licence. Generations of kiosk keepers have sat inside those tiny boxes from early morning till late at night, selling newspapers and cigarettes, sweets and bus tickets, cold water and aspirin, with directions thrown in for free. There are fewer of them now, but they're still the city's corner shop and, for many older Athenians, the place for a daily chat.

In the older cafés around the square, you'll still find men lingering over a tiny cup of Greek coffee, boiled in a small long-handled pot and drunk slowly, leaving the grounds at the bottom of the cup. Some people still turn the cup over and read their fortune in them.

Omonia means concord, and this busy square is where a great many newcomers have first met the city: villagers arriving to look for work, and, after nineteen twenty-two, refugees from Asia Minor who changed Athens for good. On the corners, look for the kiosks, the periptera. The first licences to run them were given to men wounded in the wars, in place of a pension, and they still sell almost everything, from newspapers and bus tickets to ice cream, cold water and phone chargers.

This square is named for a hero of the War of Independence, Georgios Karaiskakis, but the neighbourhood around it takes its name from something much more domestic: silk. Metaxourgeio means the silk works. In the eighteen fifties a company turned a large building here into a silk mill, and at its busiest it employed more than four hundred workers, most of them women and girls, reeling and twisting the fine thread. For a time it was the largest factory of its kind in Greece. In the eighteen seventies cheaper silk from China arrived and the mill closed, but the name stayed. The building has been restored, and now it's the city's Municipal Gallery.

Just to the south is one of the quietest places in central Athens, the archaeological site of Kerameikos. It was the potters' quarter of the ancient city, and it gave us our word ceramic. The potters came for the clay along the banks of the Eridanos, a little stream that still trickles through the site, and for centuries their workshops and kilns smoked here, turning out cups, jugs and storage jars, and the black and red painted vases that now sit in museums all over the world. The painters often signed their work, and some added little notes praising the good looks of someone they admired.

Just outside the old city gate, along the roads leading out of town, was where Athenians buried their families, and the potters' quarter grew up alongside the cemetery. Many of the gravestones show quiet farewells: two people clasping hands, a mother with her child, a woman with her jewellery box. The stone of Hegeso, which you can see at the National Archaeological Museum, was found here. Today it's a peaceful place of grass and old stones, with wildflowers in spring, frogs in the stream, and the odd tortoise making its way between the graves.

Metaxourgeio today is a mixed and changing neighbourhood. You'll find old neoclassical houses, some crumbling and some beautifully restored, alongside small theatres, galleries, street art and family-run tavernas. Older residents and newcomers live side by side, and artists have been drawn here by lower rents and big old rooms.

So as the bus passes, you're between two old kinds of making, the silk that women spun here a century and a half ago, and the clay that potters shaped just down the road more than two and a half thousand years ago.

This neighbourhood is called Metaxourgeio, the silk works, after a mill that ran here from the eighteen fifties to the eighteen seventies and employed hundreds of people, most of them women and girls. Its building is now the city's Municipal Gallery. Just to the south lies Kerameikos, the ancient potters' quarter, which gave us the word ceramic. Potters settled there for the clay along a small stream, and its old cemetery holds some of the gentlest family gravestones in Athens.

Monastiraki takes its name from the little monastery church that still sits in its square, and the area has been a marketplace for a very long time. In the lanes around Avyssinias Square, the flea market sells everything from copper pots and old records to lace, furniture and army surplus, and on Sundays it spills out into the streets. Near the square stand the walls of Hadrian's Library, built by the emperor in the second century as a quiet place of books and gardens around a long pool.

Beyond the railway line is the Ancient Agora, the heart of the old city, its marketplace and its meeting place, where people came to shop, to settle disputes and to gossip. Near one corner, archaeologists found a small house and workshop whose floor was scattered with iron hobnails, the kind used in the soles of sandals, along with the base of a cup scratched with the name Simon. Ancient writers tell of Simon the shoemaker, at whose workshop Socrates would sit and talk with young men who weren't yet old enough to take part in the business of the Agora. It's a lovely thought, that some of the first philosophy may have been done to the tap of a cobbler's hammer.

On the low hill above the Agora stands the Temple of Hephaestus, the god of metalworkers and craftsmen, one of the best-preserved Greek temples anywhere, with bronze-smiths and potters once working all around it. In the nineteen thirties, an American archaeologist named Dorothy Burr Thompson found rows of pits cut into the rock around the temple, with bits of flowerpots in them. They showed that more than two thousand years ago there had been a garden here. In nineteen fifty-six the garden was replanted, and today shrubs and trees grow around the temple much as they once did. The Agora's cats approve, and doze in its shade.

In the evening, walk along Apostolou Pavlou, the pedestrian street that curves from Thissio along the foot of the hills. This is where Athenians take the volta, the slow evening stroll: grandparents arm in arm, couples, children on scooters, friends stopping for a drink at a café table while the Acropolis turns gold above them and then lights up.

In summer, the open-air Cine Thission, here since nineteen thirty-five, shows films under the stars, with the floodlit Parthenon just behind the screen. Bring a cardigan; even in Athens, the evenings can surprise you.

Monastiraki has been a marketplace for a very long time, and its flea market still spills into the lanes. Just beyond is the Ancient Agora, where archaeologists found a workshop floor scattered with shoemaker's nails and a cup marked with the name Simon, a cobbler whose workshop Socrates is said to have visited. And at dusk, the pedestrian street towards Thissio fills with Athenians on their evening stroll, the volta, with the Acropolis glowing above them.

This is the Central Market, the Varvakeios, and it's been the city's kitchen since it opened in the eighteen eighties. The covered halls hold the meat and fish markets, where stallholders call out their prices over beds of ice. Across Athinas Street, the fruit and vegetable sellers pile up whatever is in season, figs and grapes at the end of summer, oranges and greens in winter. In the lanes around, small shops sell olives, cheese, dried herbs, beans and spices by weight, much as they have for generations. Early in the morning, the restaurant cooks and the grandmothers arrive first, and both know exactly what they want.

In the hard years after twenty ten, when the debt crisis cut wages and pensions and, at its worst, left more than a quarter of working people without a job, the market was one of the places where you could see the city coping. Shoppers bought a little less and chose more carefully. Many families moved back in together, with a grandparent's pension stretched to feed three generations. In neighbourhoods all over Athens, volunteers set up shared kitchens, food banks and free clinics. Greece left its last bailout programme in twenty eighteen, and life is steadier now, but many families still remember those years every time they write a shopping list.

Opposite is Kotzia Square, with City Hall along one side. For half a century, the square's centrepiece was the grand Municipal Theatre, designed by Ernst Ziller and opened in eighteen eighty-eight. In nineteen twenty-two, refugee families from Asia Minor made their homes in its boxes, a household in each little room. The theatre was pulled down around the start of the Second World War.

When an underground car park was planned in the nineteen eighties, archaeologists dug first, and found an ancient road with the ruts of cart wheels still in its surface, family tombs along its edges, and Roman potters' workshops with their kilns. Part of it has been left open to view at the edge of the square, a reminder that people have been coming and going, making and selling, on this spot for two and a half thousand years.

From here, the bus heads back towards Syntagma, and your loop is nearly complete. If all this talk of the market has made you hungry, the next clip is all about food, and where to find it.

Along Athinas Street is the Central Market, the Varvakeios, which has fed the city since the eighteen eighties. Under its iron roofs are the fish hall and the butchers, and across the street the fruit and vegetable stalls, with spice, olive and cheese shops in the lanes around. Next door, Kotzia Square was once the site of the Municipal Theatre, where refugee families from Asia Minor sheltered in the theatre boxes in nineteen twenty-two. Today it's an open square in front of City Hall.

If you're hopping off to eat, here's how Athens does it, and a few places that have been doing it for a long time. Hours change, so it's always worth checking the door.

The city's fast food is souvlaki. Ask for a pitta souvlaki and you get grilled meat, usually pork, wrapped in warm flatbread with tomato, onion and tzatziki, for a few euros, eaten standing up. Gyros, sliced from the turning stack, comes the same way. The classic place to try it is around Monastiraki Square, at the bottom of Mitropoleos Street. Bairaktaris, on the square itself, has been a taverna since eighteen seventy-nine, and Thanasis, a few doors away, is famous for its kebab, minced meat grilled on a skewer and served with flatbread, onion and parsley. Near Syntagma, Kostas, a tiny counter on Pentelis Street, traces its souvlaki back to nineteen fifty.

Breakfast is often eaten on the move. Look for the carts selling koulouri, rings of bread crusted with sesame, which are cheap and best early. Bakeries sell bougatsa, custard or cheese wrapped in filo, served warm with icing sugar and cinnamon. For pies, Ariston on Voulis Street, near Syntagma, has been baking since nineteen ten, and its cheese pie in buttery pastry has fed generations of politicians.

For something sweet, Krinos on Aiolou Street, near the market, has been frying loukoumades since nineteen twenty-three: little puffs of dough soaked in honey and dusted with cinnamon, in a room with mosaic floors and marble tables that hasn't changed much since. Near Omonia, on Marikas Kotopouli Street, the old dairy bar Stani has been serving thick sheep's milk yogurt with honey since nineteen thirty-one.

Then there are the market tavernas, the best lunch on this route if you don't mind paper tablecloths. Inside the Central Market, Epirus serves pots of the day's stews and soups, including patsas, the tripe soup that market workers swear by and that Athenians swear cures a hangover. Just behind the market on Sokratous Street is Diporto, down a few steps in a basement. There's no real menu, the wine comes from the barrel, and you eat whatever is cooking that day: chickpeas, a salad, fried fish. It's been there for well over a century, and the poet Kostas Varnalis put it in a poem.

To drink, try retsina, white wine flavoured with pine resin, which goes surprisingly well with fried fish, or an ouzo with a small plate of meze; it turns cloudy when you add water. And as everywhere in Greece, nobody brings the bill until you ask for it. Kali orexi. Enjoy your meal.

Athens runs on souvlaki: grilled pork in warm pitta with tomato, onion and tzatziki. Around Monastiraki Square, Bairaktaris has been feeding people since eighteen seventy-nine, and Thanasis nearby is famous for its kebab. For breakfast on the move, buy a sesame koulouri from a street cart. For something sweet, Krinos on Aiolou Street has been frying loukoumades, little honey-soaked doughnuts, since nineteen twenty-three. And by the Central Market, Diporto and Epirus are the old market tavernas: simple, cheap and very good.