Stupendous Man

Athens Day Tour

This was one tour or a day hike that I had planned well in advance. The very reason of staying at Attalos was the ability to do this hike as all major attractions were close to this hotel. You must remember from my previous post about Athens and its origins. The phrase “You must remember” has been ingrained into me, thanks to our various tour guides. One of our guides had a set of phrases that she used pretty much in any combination – “Of course”, “Therefore” and “You must remember”. Hence, you must remember what I mentioned about Athens in previous post.

So we got up very early on Day 3 as we had estimated at least 8 hours to do the day hike going through all the spots. As in any European hotel, or most of them, bathrooms tend to be very small and completely functional. Do your business and get out. Its not a vanity place. At this point, I must tell you about Greece’s sewage system. Apparently this was laid out years ago by British, who in their infinite wisdom and perhaps their desire to down the Greeks, designed the system in such a way that errr, except for human waste, nothing else can be flushed down the toilet. Sort of airline toilets . So when you are done wiping, you throw it into the waste bins next to the toilet, not in the toilet. It takes a day or two to get used to it, and the bins are cleaned every day, but still you are left with a feeling as to why the system hasn’t been upgraded. This is true for everywhere Greece, so expecting a 5 star hotel to be different is going to be umm, disappointing!

Anyways, as you remember, Athens is a plural because its made up of 13 constituencies or villages. Athens derives its name from Goddess Athina, whose temple, temple of Goddess Athina Nike is at top of Acropolis. You must remember the rest of the details like its population, cars etc. If not, read the end of part two

Traditionally if you look around the web, the recommend route is to begin from Syntagma Square, walk to 1896 olympic stadium, then do temple of Olympian Zeus, walk down to Plaka, climb up to Acropolis, climb down into Ancient agora, and then hike into Monastriki area to complete the circle and all the major attractions. Of course, you can also throw in the museums in the mix to complete a major day, but we didnt do the museums, as we are not very big fans of them anyway. But the desis at heart that we are, we did the route exactly in reverse!

A quick stop at corner bakery and coffee later, we started on our hike. We first did the Monastriki square, which is best known for its sunday flea market. One really cannot consider this is a tourist place unless you happen to be there on a sunday and flea markets interest you. Its nothing but a square, and there’s a church. Apparently there’s also a mosque there from turkish occupation, though we didnt exert enough to find it. This place though however is always pretty lively. At any given time there are small stage shows going on, or some band is playing music, or at other times we even saw skateboarding competition taking place in the square. In net, though its not a touristy spot per se, you can say that you can witness a slice of greek life out here at the square. A lot of people simply chose to find some shade and look at the random proceedings going on. We did too, but not for that long.

From here on we started our walking to get to the entrance of Ancient Agora ruins. Now each archeological site or park in Athens requires a permit, and this one was no different. But for a 12 Euro per person permit, you can pretty much visit any site in that area. We chose to go with this option as it would save us money and we were going to cover all the sites listed anyways. Coming into the ancient agora, at first is a bit of a surprise. We’ve been school brained and taught to look for signboards and help signs, or recommended routes thanks to our US stay. Unlike here, we went into the site, and were pretty much by ourselves. We could chose to go anywhere we wanted to, and I have to say the plethora of options left us clueless! We decided we’d walk to our right since we saw a nice temple perched on a hill, then walk back to center and go towards stoa of attalos and the agora museum, then again walk back to center and get out on other side. Since we didnt have a guide with us, nor did we bring a book, we were pretty much left with nothing but help screens at various sites. (Tip for visitors: If you are going to do Ancient Agora, please carry a book! Its a huge site with a lot of ruins to see. A lot of it umm, won’t make sense if you don’t know what you are looking at!). Just to give you an idea of how much there is to see, visit the Wikipedia page on Ancient Agora.

To cut a long story short, the gist is that Ancient Agora existed well as a residential and commercial complex well before 6 B.C. It went from being residential to commercial to back to residential during roman occupation. What you will find here is an amalgamation of both roman ruins as well as ruins from classical Greece period. Needless to say its interesting. The above image was taken outside a roman gymnasium, where men came to exercise and hone their skills and compete. As we walked across the gymnasium, we came across an area that clearly seemed to represent some kind of housing complex. The informational board help us understand that even 2500 years ago, the agora was a well planned city with proper sewage facilities. You can pretty much see the whole planning there. This kind of ruins or ancient cities, the last time I visited was in Lothal as a school child. It was interesting as well as humbling to realize that just as we talk about Indus valley civilization being a really really old civilization, Greek history is pretty much as old. There is no way we can claim that our history is older or oldest without giving Greece its proper place.

From there on, we headed out to the Temple of Hephaestus, which is on a small hill. Climbing up to temple gives a magnificent view of the agora ruins. The temple itself is one of the best preserved temples, which is existing almost in its entirety, even today. The temple was constructed in around 450 B.C, so yeah, its very very old. It was also used as a church for a very long time. It was believed that the temple was dedicated to God and Goddess of pottery. Later on it went on to become a church and stayed a an orthodox church for a very long time. This might be a good time to deviate into modern Greece and its beliefs. Modern Greece is pretty much made of orthodox christians. Bazyntine art dominate all these orthodox churches. Most of the churches are painted with pictures from bibilical era, telling a story or two in between. Most of the churches that we peeked into seemed very very old. We can tell you that they dont really need more churches; there are more churches at every corner much like our desh has temples and mosques. Another interesting titbit is that when you drive across greece, its not uncommon to see a small church built by side of the road. This is usually in memory of a person who had an accident and died there, or well survived. These roadside churches reminded me so much of our roadside temples and mosques. Anyways, for more information on the Temple of Hephaestus click here.

From here on, we walked all the way across the ruins, noting interesting things towards Stoa of Attalos, which also houses the museum. The Stoa of Attalos is actually pretty impressive considering it was built in 160 B.C, and measures almost 400 feet in its length. The rooms down on first floor has been converted into the museum. Like a majority of Greek monuments, this too was built on marble. Marble was and is available in ample in Greece, so one cannot fault them for build their monuments with it . We were first reluctant to visit the museum, but decided to. We were glad we did! It is a small museum, but was very very impressive. The museum had relics and artifacts from ancient Greece till roman occupation categorized into areas. It was amazing to see bowls and knives and pottery art excavated from here, and its ages down to 1600-2000 B.C, nearly 4000 years old. It is interesting to see the impact of roman occupation on the ruins of the place as well.

It was around 10.00 AM when we were done with the museum; at this point we decided to hike up to Acropolis so we were not up there in strong sun. We left the ruins at its north entrance, which also served as an entrance to Acropolis area (the hiking part). From here on, the path steadily kept going upwards. We didn’t realize how high Acropolis really is, but that is in part thanks to well paved way and also a lot of shade in the during the hike. Plus, you really climb a lot while you are in Acropolis itself, so you don’t a feeling of how high you have climbed, until you climb unto one of the vista points and soak in the views of Athens.

Once at the entrance, we were for a few moments taken aback. First, this is by far the most popular area in Athens to visit, hence the crowds were humongous! Second, for all that you see from down below, the acropolis area is huge! And third, well there was a lot of climbing left to do if you had to get to the top.

A brief introduction here. Acropolis is NOT a monument by itself. Acropolis means the sacred rock, or high city, where the most important temple of the city was. Residents also used acropolis as a place to go up higher to protect themselves when enemies attacked. There are a lot acropolis across greece, and all of them on hill/mountain tops, but the acropolis of Athens is the most popular one. Its also huge and impressive!

To quote Wikipedia’s article on Acropolis: “The entrance to the Acropolis was a monumental gateway called the Propylaea. To the south of the entrance is the tiny Temple of Athena Nike. A bronze statue of Athena, sculpted by Phidias, originally stood at its centre. At the centre of the Acropolis is the Parthenon or Temple of Athena Parthenos (Athena the Virgin). East of the entrance and north of the Parthenon is the temple known as the Erechtheum. South of the platform that forms the top of the Acropolis there are also the remains of an outdoor theatre called Theatre of Dionysus. A few hundred metres away, there is the now partially reconstructed Theatre of Herodes Atticus.”

We cannot tell you monumental and HUGE Propylaea; I dont think photos convey the hugeness of this place. Thanks to the rush and crowd, it took us forever to get past the Propylaea and get into the main site. While passing through this, you also see the temple of Athena Nike.

Before you even get into the Acropolis, though you see The theatre of Herodes Atticus. Yeah, this is the same theatre that shot Yanni to fame with his famous “Live at the Acropolis” album. One cool thing about Greece is that there are quite a few theaters that exist from ancient times that are still used for concerts and plays. Imagine yourself sitting in a 3000 year old theatre watching a concert or play. I would love to do it!

Once we got past the entrance, the main monument in the acropolis, the Parthenon comes into highlight. To say that this monument is impressive and huge is understating it. Of course all the construction work that they are doing right now, sort of blocks the magic, but its still good enough for one to go wow. The parthenon was built in 5th century BC, for goddess Athena, who was also the protector of Athens. The parthenon is also known for its architecture as one of the most perfect monuments made.

There’s a great deal of information about Parthenon on Wikipedia, and definitely much more than I know myself . However some interesting titbit about how Brits have stolen parts of the temple and now kept it in their museums rings a familiar bell to me. Obviously so far the Greek government has been unsuccessful getting their relics and parts of the temple an sculptures back from English government. Good luck with that I say!

The other important monument that you see there is also Erechtheum. We didn’t bother to read too much about this place as we were busy clicking this photographs of the parthenon and other places. You can read more about Erechtheum here. (I could have of course read the wiki myself and projected myself to be smart, but I am not going to do it )

By this time it was around noonish, and our we were getting hungry from all the walking. We spent time looking at the scenery around Acropolis. There is an awful lot to see there and we could simply go on about it, but I am going to leave it here. Don’t miss the view of God of Wine (figure who he is known as ) from Acropolis. After struggling with the crowds again, we finally got out of the entrance, and headed back. We stopped in between, to have a cool drink. We paid a ridiculous 4.50 euros for a glass of frozen lemon juice, and 50 cents for a bottle of water, the latter of which satisfied us more!

After taking some rest, we took the second route of Acropolis area. Now we had no clue where we were going to go, except that we were going in the opposite direction to Agora, and by virtue of which we should land in Plaka very soon. We were not wrong, though at times we were wondering if we needed some help to decipher where we were. Plaka, the shopping and cute commercial area is very hard to miss.

The sight of small cute shops, coupled with so much to window shop definitely got my other half excited. It was almost as if she had begun the day all over again ! Plaka is actually a very pretty area with shops and restaurants all around. Much of Plaka is closed to motor vehicles, so this makes it one big shopping / eating area without the vehicles on road. You can say that after the acropolis, Plaka is possibly the most visited area. Now, the shops here are not the big brand shops, but a lot of mom and pop stores put together. At this point we were super hungry, and some amount of tiredness was also setting in. However, unlike last time, we grabbed a soulvaki to go and sat near a park and devoured it. A gelato on top of it cooled us off . We were quite tired by this time and it was around 1.00 Pm-ish, hence we decided to rest a bit near a small park before continuing.

Our next stop was the Temple of Olympian Zeus. Amongst the Greek God hierarchy, Zeus is the most powerful and the king of all Olympian Gods, much like our Indra. This temple was dedicated to him. The temple is now situated in hustle and bustle of Athens, thereby diluting some magic out of potentially awesome place. Again, the temple seen in person is pretty impressive. In its hey day, it had more than 100 pillars, and they are of good height. If you stand near them, you realize how big this temple in its zenith must have been. It was one of the largest temples in Greece era. Don’t make the mistake of over-guessing that Olympic games are dedicated to him . You can read more about the temple here

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My other half also remarked at the state of the park itself, which I must agree is not so great. For a tourist place that is set within a park, the very minimum this place needs is a good well kept garden. Instead what you see instead is grass grown in any direction, barren land and very dusty area. Athens could do a little bit of beautification around the area to make it more pleasing. We spent another half hour here just cooling ourselves off as we were just tired from all the walking. A quick chat with the entrance guy told us that we could take a olympic stadium was right next to metro station; we decided to take the metro on our way back.

For some reason, I loved the 1896 Olympic Stadium. I had half expected it to be one teeny site, but this was huge! It was all white, and large parts of it were marble. The area around it also has been very well preserved. While you are not allowed to go in, you can stand out and gawk at the stadium. Its interesting to see the birthplace of 1896 Olympics.

After we finished with the stadium, we took the metro to Syntagma square, or the parliament square, I must say for a tourist attraction, a parliament building doesnt count. And certainly not this one!

It was nothing special at all. I mean seriously, Vidhan Soudha in Bangalore is a much more impressive monument. So they really should not advertise this as a tourist attraction at all. We were told that the guard changing ceremony is something to watch for, but we were not willing to wait for it. Instead we took the straight road from Syntagma square, through mall area, back to our hotel. There were a lot of big malls and shops on the way back. But by this time it was around 3, and coupled with tiredness and heat, even my other half displayed no real interest in entering a mall. It was cool though to see the shops as they seemed to have made the malls in older venetian style buildings, which was pretty cool.

At around 3.30-ish we came back to our hotel, thereby ending our day trip in Athens. We took around 7 and half hours to do the entire route, and we had to say it was a lot of fun. The route of history so to speak was a lot of fun. For those who do plan to do this hike, make sure you have good shoes, lots of water and lots of sunscreen with you on the way. And don’t forget to grab a snack at regular intervals .

As the day winded down, we were too tired to go out for dinner. Hence we headed back to our roof-top bar for more ice-creams and juice. At the same time, we took some night shots of Acropolis, which is actually pretty impressive even at night. Can’t deny that our hotel had a very good view of Acropolis.

We hit the bed early as we were going to early in the morning for our 2 day Delphi Meteora guided tour.

…Continued to part 4