Stop 1 — The edge of Plaka, below the rock
Begin where the flat, busy ground of Monastiraki gives way to the first climbing lanes of Plaka, with the honey-coloured cliff of the Acropolis filling the sky to the south. Stand for a moment and take in the layering: cafés and souvenir stalls at your feet, the tiled roofs of the old town stepping up the slope, and the ancient citadel floating above it all. This is the oldest continuously inhabited quarter of Athens, sometimes called the "neighbourhood of the gods" for the company it keeps beneath the sacred hill.
Plaka as you see it is mostly a nineteenth-century creation, rebuilt in a genteel neoclassical style after Greek independence when Athens, a dusty town of a few thousand people, was suddenly made the capital of a new kingdom in 1834. Beneath that tidy surface, though, the street plan is far older and tangled, following lanes laid down in Ottoman and Byzantine and even classical times, which is exactly why it rewards wandering rather than marching. Let the map go for the next few minutes and simply drift uphill.
Stop 2 — Anafiotika, the island on the slope
Climb until the shops fall away and the lanes narrow to the width of a doorway, the paving turns to whitewashed steps, and bougainvillea spills over blue-shuttered cottages barely bigger than a room. You have reached Anafiotika, and it looks less like a capital city than a village dropped in from the Aegean — because in a sense it was. In the 1840s and 50s, stonemasons brought from the Cycladic island of Anafi to build King Otto’s new palace put up houses for themselves here in the only style they knew, the cubic, sugar-cube architecture of their home islands.
They built, so the story goes, under an old law that a house roofed overnight could not be torn down, which is why these cottages seem to have sprouted from the rock rather than been planned. Only a few dozen survive, clinging to the northern face of the Acropolis directly beneath the walls, and residents still live behind those low doors, so keep your voice down and treat the lanes as the private courtyards they partly are. Then follow the path as it curves west around the base of the rock.
Stop 3 — The promenade and the Areopagus
The path around the hill delivers you onto Dionysiou Areopagitou, the broad marble pedestrian avenue that sweeps around the southern and western foot of the Acropolis. This is one of the great city walks of Europe, cleared of traffic and lined with cafés and the facades of neoclassical mansions, and it carries you gently up toward the main entrance to the site. As you go, the ruins of the Theatre of Dionysos and the arched stone bulk of the Odeon of Herodes Atticus open up on your left, cut into the southern slope.
Just before the ticket gate, a bare grey outcrop rises on your right, worn slippery by centuries of feet and reached by a metal stair: the Areopagus, or "hill of Ares." In classical Athens this rock was the seat of an ancient council that tried cases of murder and, later, guarded the laws of the young democracy. It is best known now for a single afternoon around 51 AD, when the apostle Paul is said to have stood here and preached to the Athenians about their altar "to an unknown god" — a moment marked by a bronze plaque at the foot of the steps. Climb it if you like for a free preview of the view, then turn to the gate.
Stop 4 — Through the Propylaea
Pass through the ticket gate and climb the ramp toward the monumental entrance, a forest of tall Doric columns framing the way up. This is the Propylaea, the grand gateway to the sanctuary, built between 437 and 432 BC by the architect Mnesikles as the ceremonial threshold every ancient procession crossed. It was deliberately theatrical: you climb through shade and a screen of columns before the summit and its temples burst open in front of you, a piece of stage management two and a half thousand years old that still works on the modern crowd.
Before you go through, look up and to your right at the small, exquisite temple perched on the bastion above the ramp. That is the Temple of Athena Nike — Athena as bringer of victory — a jewel-box of Ionic columns built around 420 BC and probably designed by Kallikrates, one of the architects of the Parthenon. It was dismantled by the Ottomans to build a gun emplacement, then carefully rebuilt from its own scattered stones, twice, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Its parapet once carried the famous relief of a winged victory pausing to adjust her sandal, now in the museum you will finish at.
Stop 5 — The Parthenon
Step out onto the summit and let the Parthenon do what it was built to do. This is the great temple of Athena Parthenos, Athena the Virgin, raised between 447 and 432 BC at the height of Athenian power under the statesman Pericles, who poured the tribute of an empire into a building programme that his critics said dressed the city up "like a vain woman." The architects were Iktinos and Kallikrates, and the whole sculptural scheme was overseen by Phidias, the greatest sculptor of the age, whose lost gold-and-ivory statue of the goddess once stood forty feet tall in the gloom inside.
It looks like an assembly of straight lines, but almost nothing here is straight. The columns swell slightly at the middle and lean inward; the floor arches gently upward at the centre; the corner columns are fatter and set closer together. These are deliberate optical refinements, calculated so that a building the eye would otherwise read as sagging or spindly instead looks perfectly, effortlessly regular. The temple survived as a church and then a mosque for a thousand years and more, until 1687, when a Venetian shell hit the gunpowder the Ottomans were storing inside and blew the middle of it apart in a single night. Much of what was left of its sculpture was removed by Lord Elgin a century later — the argument over its return is still very much alive.
Stop 6 — The Erechtheion and the Caryatids
Cross to the smaller, stranger temple on the north side of the summit, an asymmetric building of slender Ionic columns set at odd angles and different levels. This is the Erechtheion, finished around 406 BC, and its lopsided plan is not a mistake: it was built to shelter the holiest relics on the rock at once — the spot where, in myth, Athena and Poseidon competed for the city. Poseidon struck the rock and brought forth a spring of seawater; Athena planted an olive tree; the Athenians judged the olive the better gift and named their city for her. A sacred olive still grows beside the temple to mark the tale.
Its most famous feature faces you on the south porch: six carved maidens, the Caryatids, standing calm and weight-bearing where columns would normally be, each draped so that the folds of her robe fall like the flutes of a column. The six on the building today are copies. Five of the originals are a few hundred metres away in the Acropolis Museum, kept safe from Athens’ acid air; the sixth was taken by Lord Elgin and sits in the British Museum, and Athenians will tell you her five sisters are still waiting for her. Take the path now toward the eastern end of the summit.
Stop 7 — The view, and the way down
Before you leave, walk to the eastern parapet, near the Greek flag that flies from the highest point of the rock, and give yourself the reward for the climb. The whole white sprawl of modern Athens fans out below, ringed by mountains, with the green cone of Lykavittos hill rising to the north, the ancient marketplace of the Agora and its intact little temple of Hephaistos just below you to the northwest, and, on a clear day, the sea and the island of Aegina shimmering to the southwest. The flag itself carries a wartime story every Athenian knows, of the young men who climbed here under occupation in 1941 to tear down a swastika raised over the ancient stones.
Now retrace your steps out through the Propylaea and down the ramp — the only way off the rock is the way you came up. Rejoin the marble promenade and turn downhill toward the south, following the signs and the modern building of glass and concrete that comes into view below the slope. It is a walk of only a few minutes from the gate to the door of the Acropolis Museum, and it is the perfect second half of the day: everything you have just squinted at against the sky is waiting inside at eye level.
Stop 8 — Into the Acropolis Museum
Arrive at the Acropolis Museum, the low, luminous building at the foot of the southern slope that opened in 2009 to house everything found on the rock and its flanks. Even the approach is part of the exhibit: the architects, Bernard Tschumi with the Greek architect Michael Photiadis, set the whole museum on pillars over a working archaeological dig, so you cross a glass floor above the excavated streets and houses of an ancient Athenian neighbourhood before you have seen a single statue. Look down as you enter — the ruins beneath your feet are real, and still being studied.
The building climbs in the order of the hill itself, from the finds of the slopes up through the archaic statues to the top-floor Parthenon Gallery, the reason many people come. That glass-walled hall is built to the exact footprint and compass bearing of the Parthenon and set so that, through the windows, you can see the temple itself on the rock above while you stand among its sculptures. The surviving slabs of the frieze are mounted at their original height, and where a panel is missing a stark white plaster cast stands in its place — a quiet, deliberate argument, in blank stone, for the return of the marbles still held in London. It is a fitting place to end a walk that began in the lanes below and climbed to the summit between.
