Athens has a public transport system that is significantly better than its reputation among visitors who arrive expecting Mediterranean chaos and find instead a functional, clean, reasonably priced network covering all the main tourist destinations and most of the city’s residential neighborhoods. The Athens metro in particular — opened for the 2004 Olympics, extended several […]
Athens has an alternative and post-punk music scene that is genuinely surprising for visitors who arrive expecting only bouzouki and summer beach clubs — a underground culture of considerable depth, rooted in the same social conditions that produced the house music scene (cheap rents enabling creative communities, a late-night culture that operates on its own
Voula is the Athenian Riviera neighborhood that sits in the best possible position: south of Glyfada (which is well-known and slightly commercial), north of Vouliagmeni (which is well-known and expensive), and therefore in the specific gap where quality is high, prices are honest, crowds are manageable, and the combination of good beaches, good restaurants, and
Flisvos Marina in Paleo Faliro is one of Athens’s most successful urban renewal projects and one of the finest marina-waterfront experiences in the greater Mediterranean — a 14km coastal promenade that runs from the Phaleron Delta (where the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Cultural Center stands) south to the marina itself and beyond, with cycling infrastructure, jogging
Vouliagmeni is the finest thing within 30km of central Athens — a coastal suburb at the southern end of the Athenian Riviera that combines a thermal lake of extraordinary character, beaches that compete with the finest in the Mediterranean, a marina with superyacht infrastructure and excellent waterfront restaurants, and the specific quality of a place
The Pnyx is one of the most historically significant sites in the world — the semicircular hill immediately west of the Acropolis where the Athenian assembly (Ekklesia) met to conduct the business of the world’s first democracy from approximately 507 BC to 322 BC. Every adult male Athenian citizen had the right to speak and
Athens has undergone a transformation in the last decade that has not yet been fully registered by international perception — from a city associated primarily with economic crisis, austerity, and early-2010s hardship to one of the most genuinely liveable cities in southern Europe for people who choose it deliberately. The combination of dramatically lower cost
The Athens Concert Hall — known universally in Greece as the Megaron (Μέγαρον Μουσικής Αθηνών, the Athens Megaron of Music) — is the finest performing arts venue in Greece and one of the significant concert halls of southern Europe. Opened in 1991, designed by the architects Ioannis Vikelas and Manuel Lozano Morales in a collaboration
Athens accommodation has more genuinely good options than most visitors realize before they arrive — and more genuine pitfalls for those who don’t know what to look for. The question of Airbnb versus hotel in Athens is more nuanced than in most European cities because the specific geography of the city (the neighborhoods vary dramatically
Delphi is the most important day trip from Athens — not the closest, not the easiest, but the one that rewards the effort most completely. The sanctuary of Apollo on the slopes of Mount Parnassus, where the Oracle spoke for almost 1,000 years and where the most powerful people in the ancient world came seeking
