My visit to Athens gets off to a rocky start. As I prepare to check into my hotel, it seems something is awry. While I've got the right hotel and the correct day, it soon transpires I've arrived a year early. Yep, I accidentally booked for 2026. As much as I like to be fully prepared, this is a bit much even for me.
To make matter worse, the hotel is fully booked. The summer holidays might be over, but the season in Greece is still far from slowing down in late September.
Accommodation is soon sorted – shoutout to my taxi driver who declared: “We will drive until we find a room!”. If I haven’t yet mentioned that Greeks are among the kindest, friendliest and loveliest people I have ever met, now would be the time.
The next morning, I have eight hours to fill until 3pm when I have to leave for the airport. Time limited, I firmly stick to the classics; the Acropolis, the Acropolis Museum and Plaka.
Skip Acropolis queues with an early morning walking tour
I start at the Acropolis, Athen's ancient citadel. How could I not? Rising 515ft above the city, it dominates the low-rise skyline as an eternal reminder of just how much history this ancient country is steeped in. The Parthenon sits on top, just as it has since the 5th century BC, having witnessed war, invasion and conquest, and remaining relatively intact despite a direct hit from a mortar shell courtesy of the Venetians in 1687 during the siege of Athens.
I booked my visit to the Acropolis in advance through Athens Walking Tours, opting for a €67 (Dh284) skip-the-line ticket which offered a tour and, more importantly, access to the Parthenon before the crowds descend. Believe me, when they descend, they descend en masse.
When I arrive at 7.30am, the queue for the ticket office is already an hour or so long. The price of a standard summer ticket is €30 (€15 in winter), but pre-booking the tour means our small group has around 20 minutes to explore and take photos before the daily allocation of 20,000 visitors starts to filter through. It is well worth the higher ticket price.
The cap on visitor numbers to the Acropolis was introduced in 2023 to prevent overcrowding. It doesn’t. Instead it quickly becomes packed after the gates are opened. It gets pretty windy up there and it's chilly early in the morning, so I dress accordingly.
Our guide, Rina takes us around the Parthenon, the Propylaea, the Temple of Athena Nike and the Erechtheion, offering up an impressive array of names, dates, places and information which she tells me Greeks are taught in school from a young age. It’s sometimes hard to tell which tales are true and what is myth, but in a city this old, life can easily become legend and vice versa.
Book online to save time at Acropolis Museum
From the Acropolis, it’s a short walk to the Acropolis Museum. Again, I pre-booked my ticket (€26, or €20 from the museum) and breeze past the queue to immerse myself in the array of artefacts dating from the 7th century BC. The busts and sculptures are serenely beautiful, basking in the relatively hushed awe of onlookers.
The Magic Sphere, dating back to the 2nd or 3rd century AD, is an intriguing highlight, alongside everyday items – the pottery, lamps, decorative hair clips, water bowls and vases – which linger in the memory as reminders that these were used by real people passing through history, just as we are. I wonder whether in any other city, the past comes this close to feeling like fairytale.
Any visitor to Athens cannot fail to notice the graffiti. It’s absolutely everywhere. I’m not a fan of the more inane stuff (“Sophia + Alexander 4eva!”), so I find it amusing at the museum to chance upon a marble fragment graffitied with the words: “Lysias is handsome”. Written in red by a lovestruck 5th century BC maiden, or perhaps by young Lysias himself, it occurs to me that maybe Sophia and Alexander's romance may raise a wry smile millennia from now.
On the top floor of the museum, the Parthenon Gallery holds a mixture of the original Parthenon sculptures and plaster cast replicas that complete the visual story of the frieze that once decorated the temple. The replicas are of sculptures lost or damaged over time, or removed in the 19th century by the Scottish nobleman Lord Thomas Elgin and now displayed in the British Museum – their absence remains a disputed cultural issue.
Less contested, the English poet Lord Byron is revered in Greece, not only for opposing Elgin’s removal of the pieces, but for the leading part he played in the Greek War of Independence against the Ottoman Empire, dying during the campaign in 1824, aged 36. A statue of him stands just past Hadrian’s Arch, outside the National Garden.
Eat filo pastries and shop quality trinkets in Plaka
From the museum, it’s a 10 to 15-minute walk to Plaka, the oldest section of Athens, centred around Kydathineon and Adrianou streets. This is where most tourists gravitate at some point, and the narrow streets are very busy during my visit.
Tempted by the array of filo pastry pies on offer (Greeks love their pastry) – spinach, leek, mushroom, chicken, ham and cheese and sausage – I stop by Diogenes Food Hall. I choose one that combines my two favourite food groups – carbohydrates and carbohydrates: potato pie.
In this busy and touristy but no less charming district, the offerings are cafe, restaurant, gelato, souvenir shop, repeat. I am pleasantly surprised to discover that the quality of the products in the shops is way above the usual trinkets one associates with a tourist area. Sure, there are the “I heart Greece” T-shirts and the 300 film-themed paraphernalia, but the jewellery, leather sandals and cotton children’s clothes are excellent quality. I part with about €100 with no regrets.
Word to the money-wise: cash is still king in Greece. All the shops and taxi drivers I meet express a preference for cash over card, with some shops offering a discount to pay in notes, so my advice is to have cash on you to barter for a better bargain. Plus, you’ll have some coins left over to tip the many buskers.
So, can you effectively “do” Athens in eight hours? Well, no, but also a little bit yes. Who’s to say you can claim to have “done” the city during a standard two-week-long holiday, either? With an understanding that most cities take a lifetime to fully appreciate, my day in Athens taught me that any time spent dipping a toe into a different culture is time well spent. And I’ll be back. Athens has been there for 5,000 years, give or a take a few millennia, so there’s plenty of time.
