Archaeology and the Acropolis

This was a two-museum day (museum-feet!), and a lot more walking. We did a morning self-guided tour of the neighborhoods around our Airbnb, by chance catching the presidential guards doing their slow-motion step movements. An arch commemorating Emperor Hadrian is just standing alone alongside a busy boulevard, as are the ruins of Zeus’ temple. Archaeological artifacts everywhere!

The Athens Archaeological Museum is nice, but the audioguide was a little overwhelming, so we skipped it and just wandered around the sculptures and artifacts of offerings from various tombs over various centuries. In the Bronze collection, they featured an object called the Antikythera mechanism, also called a clockwork computer. It was built around 200 BC and is regarded as the first known analog computer! Among the wealth of information it could calculate: the positions of the sun, moon, planets and stars; the lunar phase; the dates of upcoming solar eclipses; the speed of the Moon through the sky; the dates of the Olympic games and so much more. Learn more about it yourself on the Atlas Obscura website.

After a brief break at our apartment, we met our guide for a tour of the Acropolis Museum and the Acropolis site (after days of tantalizing views of the site from below). The museum is fantastic! Recently built in 2018, it is an architectural marvel in addition to housing an extensive collection of the original friezes and statuary from the Acropolis (the parts that weren’t taken away for the British Museum, that is!). The ground floor and entranceway feature glass floors, providing views of the excavation of ancient Athenian neighborhoods beneath the museum.

Our guide noted that the marble architectural elements, as well as the sculptures, were originally colorfully decorated by using mineral pigments mixed with beeswax.

Then it was up, up, up to the Acropolis site itself. It was amazing to be walking among these monuments from the 5th century BC.

We finished off the day with a short mythology theater presentation on the rooftop of a building, with the Acropolis in full view in the background.Read more