15 hours in Athens (take that NYT!)

How much can you see with only 15 hours in Athens? A lot, apparently, if you are lucky enough to catch the excellent Free Walking Tour.  We almost were not so fortunate.  We landed at 10am and had to wait over an hour for the shuttle that would take us to our airport hotel, resulting in a mad sprint for the local bus into town in hopes of joining the noon tour.  Say what you will about the Greek economy but I can vouch that their public transportation is on point.

The two people who sprinted up to the group standing around Syntagma Square at 11:58am?  That was us. We barely made it.  Had we not, we we would have been hosed since our plan B was "to walk around and look at old stuff".  Plan A was definitely more edifying.  Led by our cheery guide, Maria, we were soon underway.
The first stop was one we would have most likely missed.  It was a subway station.  One of the major themes of the tour was reconciling past and present.  Here was a perfect example of this juxtaposition. Years back, the traffic in Athens had reached a point where something had to be done. A metro line was proposed.  The problem was that in a city as ancient as this one, the excavation necessary to build a rail line was certain to destroy countless artifacts.  Without it, the pollution caused by all that traffic was going to undermine the very history they were trying to save.  So a compromise position was reached.  Working closely with archeologists, they made each stop a mini-museum, preserving and displaying objects that had been discovered during the digging process and recreating the many levels of civilization found underfoot along the walls. 


When we came out the other side, we were soon at the site of the first modern Olympic Stadium and home to every single Olympic torch since.  Our guide explained that in 1896, when the first games took place, Athens was not a big city and this was not exactly the obvious choice.  Despite this fact, the organizers wanted to establish a link to the glory days of the ancient empire and the original Greek competitions.  They liked this site with a clear view of the Acropolis and all the history that surrounded it, so the marble stadium was soon built. To further tie it all together, they included the first "marathon" as an event, honoring Pheiddippides, the soldier who had run from the town of Marathon to Athens to announce the defeat of the Persians back in the 400's BC.  Sounds heroic and patriotic enough, only it would have helped if someone would have bothered to read the entire story. You see, as soon as Pheiddy, arrived in Athens and breathlessly (and I mean this literally) announced the victory, he promptly dropped dead of exhaustion.  It was forty-two damned kilometers!  Didn't they have any horses in ancient Greece?  Were they just trying to get rid of this guy?  And now, this was to be an event at the first Olympics.  Once people got word of how long this race was going to be, they suggested that maybe the distance could be tweaked a bit and just maybe they could avoid having runners dropping like flies in their city.  But no,  someone had to be a stickler for detail and it was to be 42 km (or over 26 miles).  To this day, that is the distance of all marathons.




Next up, Hadrian's Gate, a Roman triumphal arch.  One side reads "this is Athens, the ancient city of Theseus" and the other reads "this is the city of Hadrian, and not of Theseus" so it is possible that this was a dividing line of sorts.



Right across from it was the Temple of Zeus.  As with all the archeological sites, we did not enter because you can only fit so much into a 3 hour tour but seeing as our day was not much longer than that, an overview was more than enough.  Plus it was always possible to see the ruins from outside.




We continued past both the Greek and Roman agoras, stopping only for a fifteen minute break on a pedestrian street.



By the time, we finished the tour by the entrance of the Acropolis, we had already seen more than we could have imagined possible in such a short time.

Yet, we still had time to hit a cafe, climb atop the Hill of Ares for its scenic view and go into the always-under-renovation Acropolis.




With no guide to accompany us, we were back to Plan B of walking around and looking at old stuff...but it was some very impressive old stuff.














And still, we were not done. We squeezed in some souvenir shopping, plate breaking and even one last gluttonous assault on the countries' olive oil and feta supply.   Imagine if only we would have had a full 24 hours to work with.  That would have been enough to see the entire city (yet not enough to even consider covering 42 stinking kilometers).

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