The Acropolis of Athens Guided Tour with Skip-the-Line Tickets

Overview

Two hours on the rock with a licensed guide, followed by a walk down into the modern city. The single most important thing to sort out before you arrive is the ticket, because the wording on these bookings causes more confusion than anything else on offer in Athens.

Admission is separate, and it is timed

Entry to the Acropolis is settled separately on site, so buy a timed entry ticket in advance rather than on the day: in season, arriving without one means waiting at the booth while the rest of your group climbs. Priority applies at the ticket desk. The queue at the gate itself is common to every visitor, whatever ticket they hold.

Go at opening or late in the day

There is no shade on the summit, no water above the entrance, and the marble reflects heat upwards. On extreme days the authorities close the site through the middle of the afternoon for safety, sometimes at a few hours' notice. The first slot after opening is cool, clear and comparatively empty; the last two hours before closing have the better light and thinner crowds. Anything between eleven and three in summer is an endurance exercise.

The building contains almost no straight lines

This is the thing to look for while you are up there. The columns are not vertical: they lean slightly inwards, and if extended would converge more than two kilometres overhead. They swell in the middle, the corner ones are fatter than the rest, and the platform they stand on curves upward towards its centre by several centimetres. All of it corrects for the way the eye distorts long horizontals and tall verticals. A building that looks perfectly rectilinear is, in fact, almost entirely curved.

It was a church for longer than it was a temple

The Parthenon served Athena for roughly eight hundred years. It then spent about nine hundred as a Christian church, dedicated to the Virgin, with an apse cut into the east end and bishops buried inside. After 1458 it became a mosque, and a minaret rose from the south-west corner — you can still see the stair that climbed it. The building most people think of as a Greek temple has spent more of its life as somebody else's place of worship.

The whiteness is a misunderstanding

The sculptures and much of the trim were painted, in strong reds, blues and gold, and the figures had metal fittings. Bare white marble is what time and cleaning left behind, and the idea that classical restraint meant colourlessness is a modern invention that would have baffled the builders.

The iron they had to remove

A restoration a century ago used iron clamps, which rusted, expanded and cracked the marble they were holding. The current programme, running since the 1970s, has been dismantling that work and replacing the metal with titanium, which does not corrode. The cranes on the summit are not a sign of neglect; they are the repair of an earlier repair.

The women on the porch are copies

The draped figures holding up the small temple's roof are casts. The originals sit in a climate-controlled gallery down the hill, except for one, which is in London, and the empty space left for her in the display is deliberate.

Down in the square

The soldiers outside the parliament building change on the hour in a slow, deliberately stylised drill. The kilt has four hundred pleats, one for each year of Ottoman rule, and the shoes carry iron nails so that the steps ring on the paving.

Practicalities

Wear shoes with grip; the paths are polished stone and genuinely slippery. Bring water and a hat. This booking does not carry free cancellation, so the date is fixed once booked.