Set on the southern slope of the Acropolis on Dionysiou Areopagitou Street in central Athens, the Acropolis Museum is the principal modern presentation of the sculpture and architectural remains of the great hilltop sanctuary above. The current building was inaugurated on 20 June 2009 to designs by the Swiss-French architect Bernard Tschumi and replaced the earlier small museum on the summit of the rock that had served the same function since the late nineteenth century. The need for a new muse.....

Rising one hundred and fifty metres above the centre of modern Athens, the Acropolis is one of the most internationally recognised single sites in the world and the principal symbolic heart of ancient Greek civilisation. The limestone outcrop has been occupied continuously since the Neolithic period and served progressively as a Mycenaean royal palace, an early Greek religious sanctuary, a classical Athenian sacred precinct and a medieval Frankish fortress before being recognised in the modern p.....

Stretching across the open ground at the northern foot of the Acropolis below the Areopagus Hill, the Ancient Agora of Athens was the principal civic, commercial and political square of ancient Athens from the sixth century BC through to the Roman period. The site provides one of the most evocative open-air archaeological landscapes anywhere in Greece and was the principal everyday gathering place of the citizens of the classical Athenian democracy. The Agora was first laid out as a public squa.....

Opened on 19 October 2024 in a converted five-storey building at the corner of Favierou and Marni a short walk from the central Omonia square in Athens, the Greece in Miniature Museum is the first dedicated museum of architectural miniatures in Greece and one of the more innovative recent additions to the Athenian cultural calendar. The privately owned museum presents detailed one-to-fifty scale models of the principal monuments and landscapes of Greece spread across five themed exhibition floor.....

A vast Roman building complex on the eastern edge of the Monastiraki square in central Athens, the Library of Hadrian was completed in 132 AD by the philhellene Roman emperor Hadrian as the principal cultural and educational facility of the Roman provincial capital. The building covered around twenty-three thousand square metres and was the largest single Roman building constructed anywhere in Greece during the imperial period. The emperor Hadrian had a particularly deep personal attachment to .....

The Athens branch of the international Hard Rock Cafe chain occupies a converted historic building on Adrianou Street in the Monastiraki district of central Athens, immediately below the northern slope of the Acropolis. The Athens venue opened in 2004 and is one of the principal international locations of the famous American themed restaurant chain founded in London in 1971. The Hard Rock Cafe chain was founded by the American entrepreneurs Isaac Tigrett and Peter Morton, who opened the first v.....

A small interactive museum in a restored neoclassical mansion on Iraklidon Street in the Thissio district of central Athens, the Herakleidon Museum was founded in 2004 by the Greek-American collectors Pavlos and Anna-Belinda Fyros as a private cultural foundation dedicated to the intersection of art, science, mathematics and technology. The institution has operated as a non-profit civil company since 2008 and is one of the more innovative small museums anywhere in Athens. The host building is a.....

Performed on a small rooftop venue at the Webster University Cultural Centre on Markou Avriliou Street in the Plaka district immediately below the northern slope of the Acropolis, the Koilon Theatre is a small Greek theatrical company that produces the only daily English-language ancient Greek theatre performance in Athens during the summer season. The company takes its name from the Greek word for the curved seating area of the ancient Greek theatre and has been producing rooftop performances a.....

Day trips to the spectacular monastic complex of Meteora in central Greece are one of the most popular long excursions for visitors to Athens and provide an essential complement to any cultural visit to the country. The complex of six surviving Orthodox Christian monasteries perched on top of vertical sandstone pillars near the small town of Kalambaka sits around three hundred and fifty kilometres north of Athens and is reached typically by guided coach tour or by self-driven car. The Meteora m.....

The principal Orthodox Christian cathedral of Athens, the Metropolitan Church of the Annunciation of the Holy Virgin Mary, is the seat of the Archbishop of Athens and All Greece and the principal venue for the major religious and civil ceremonies of the modern Greek state. The current building was completed on 21 May 1862 after twenty years of construction and is one of the largest cathedrals built in the post-independence period anywhere in the Balkans. The decision to build a new cathedral in.....