Museums in Athens
1 museums to discover with Bad Historian in Athens.
Athens Audio Experiences
Visit these museums and more on a self-guided audio experience.
Athens in One Morning
Everybody who ever came through Athens tried to put their name on it. This is the first-timer's walk, from Syntagma Square to the marble Panathenaic Stadium, told through the people the guidebook leaves out: the teenage Bavarian king who lost a country in the square outside his own window, a refugee who renamed himself and brought souvlaki back to Monastiraki, a hundred and ninety ballots found at the bottom of a well with the same name on every one, a Swedish writer who watched the Parthenon blow up and carried a book home from the ruins, the hermits who lived on top of the Temple of Olympian Zeus, and a water carrier who won the first Olympic marathon and asked the King for a cart. Ten stops, about four kilometers, twenty-five centuries. Nearly all of it is true. Five things are mine. The Parthenon stop plays on the Acropolis itself, so bring a ticket if you're going up.
Fingerprints on the Parthenon
Everyone who got their hands on the Acropolis left a mark you can still find. This walk climbs from Dimitris Pikionis's path, paved with the wreckage of demolished Athens, past the Odeon built for a wife whose husband stood trial for her death, through a gate that was never finished, to the Parthenon itself: the sculptor who was tried for putting his own face on the goddess's shield, the engineer whose iron clamps are slowly splitting the marble, and the hole in the Erechtheion's roof left open for a god. It ends where two teenagers took down the swastika in 1941, and in the theater where Socrates stood up in the audience to be laughed at. Eight stops, one hill. Most of this walk is inside the Acropolis site, so you'll need a ticket. Nearly all of it is true. Four things are mine.
The Village That Appeared Overnight
Almost nothing in Plaka is doing the job it was built for. This walk starts at a chapel with a hotel standing on stilts over it, where, the story goes, a man made the Ottoman army's gunpowder by day and the rebels' by night, and a woman smuggled it out under the dirty laundry. It passes a church with a calendar of pagan holidays over its door, a governor who blew up an ancient column to make plaster, an emperor's olive-oil law that paid informers half, a clock from before Christ with a backup clock inside it, and the house below the Acropolis where a Berlin architect wanted to put the king's palace on top of the rock. It ends in Anafiotika, the island village stonemasons built overnight under the Acropolis, legally, because of a rule about roofs. Nine stops. Nearly all of it is true. Five things are mine.
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