Athens keeps 3,500 years of receipts. This route runs from the Dipylon Gate where Pericles buried the war dead, through Byzantine churches built from pagan rubble, to the buckled Polytechnic gate that ended a dictatorship in 1973.
The potters' quarter and city cemetery used from the 12th century BC, where Pericles gave his funeral oration in 431 BC. The Dipylon Gate, Sacred Way and grave stele of the horseman Dexileos survive; the museum holds the originals.
Julius Caesar and Augustus funded this marble market after 19 BC. Its centrepiece, the octagonal Tower of the Winds (c. 50 BC), worked as water clock, sundial and weathervane in one — the oldest surviving meteorological station.
Over 25,000 objects from the 4th to 19th centuries, housed in the Villa Ilissia built for the Duchess of Plaisance in 1848. Rescued wall paintings, a reconstructed early Christian basilica and icon screens trace pagan Athens turning Byzantine.
A tiny cruciform church of around 1200, built entirely from recycled ancient marble — pagan reliefs, crosses cut over older carving, and a fragment of a calendar of Attic festivals set into the wall. The 1862 cathedral looms beside it.
The Old Parliament on Stadiou, seat of Greek government from 1875 to 1935. Inside are Lord Byron's helmet and sword, Kolokotronis' arms, and the banners of the 1821 War of Independence, in the chamber where the constitution was argued for sixty years.
Carved in 1930-32 into the terrace wall of the 1843 royal palace — Parliament since 1935 — the relief of a dying hoplite is flanked by the names of Greek battlefields. Evzones in fustanella change guard on the hour, in silence.
Rebuilt in Pentelic marble for the first modern Olympics of 1896, on the 4th-century BC running track of Lykourgos that Hadrian later refaced for wild-beast games. Sixty-eight rows seat 50,000; the vaulted athletes' tunnel is open.
The 1862 Averoff building where students seized the campus on 14 November 1973 and broadcast from a pirate radio until a tank crushed the gate at dawn on 17 November, beginning the end of the colonels' junta. The buckled gate is kept as a memorial.
Antonis Benakis' family mansion tells Greek material culture floor by floor: Neolithic goldwork, Fayum funerary portraits, two complete carved wooden reception rooms lifted from Macedonian mansions, and personal relics of the 1821 fighters.
Around thirty whitewashed houses raised without permits in the 1860s by stonemasons from Anafi and the Cyclades, hired to build King Otto's palace. The lanes are barely shoulder-width and press straight against the north face of the Acropolis rock.
Four floors on 2,300 years of Greek Jewry, from the Greek-speaking Romaniote communities to the destruction of Salonica's 50,000. The reconstructed 1904 Patras synagogue interior and hidden-child testimonies from the 1943-44 occupation anchor it.
The Pnyx slope is where the Athenian assembly voted from 507 BC, its speaker's bema still cut from the bedrock. Uphill stands the tomb of Philopappos, a Commagenian prince, built 114-116 AD, above quarried paths laid by Dimitris Pikionis in the 1950s.