Santorini, Athens

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51. Santorini, Athens

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I booked a tragically early flight back to Athens, which required catching a taxi at 6 am and missing out on the stunning breakfast I had enjoyed yesterday. Unlike the flights to Mykonos, these were actually full. I had intended to book a flight departing around noon, but while I was thinking about it, it had already filled up. I didn't want to wait for the evening flight, because I wanted to allow more time to explore Athens.

I landed in Athens around 8:00. It's a nice modern airport, built for the Olympics which had been held here a year earlier. The ride from here to Syntagma on the subway takes about an hour, and the system is also very modern and clean. I headed for the hotels just to the southeast of the square in the neighborhood of Plaka. Unfortunately, everything in the guidebooks in this area was full! I tried perhaps half a dozen, and things were looking fairly hopeless. Just next to the Hermes Hotel, I tried one which was not in the guidebook, the Central. At €90, this was more expensive than its neighbor, but the room was relatively posh compared to what I was used to, with a nice, large, sparkling bathroom.

The books say that one should just see the essential sights of Athens and then get out as quickly as possible. But I found the place to be really quite pleasant and interesting, and I would have been happy to linger. I walked west along the pedestrian streets of Plaka, where I had an excellent take-away gyro from a touristy place for only €1,60. The amazing Acropolis was looming above, high on a small plateau with steep cliffs separating it from the rest of the city. Now to get up into it from here, be sure to head round the south side, as it's very difficult to get through the other way. If you have a bag, you have to walk all the way to the far western entrance where the cloakroom is. They understandably require bags to be checked; I think people like to make off with bits of the Parthenon, which is an unbelievably horrible thing to do.

In a way, my trip had been like riding a time machine going backward. Modern times — 17th century and later — in northern Europe. The 15th-century Renaissance in northern Italy. The splendor of the empire of Rome, 100 BC - 300 AD. And now I was at the end of the line in Athens, where the culture of ancient Greece reached its zenith around 600 - 400 BC. This was the birthplace of Western civilization — I was getting back to my roots, in what was an ultimate sort of way. Of course, I was also feeling a lot of sadness, knowing that the end of the trip was imminent. The past few weeks had gone by too quickly.

Despite the ravages of time (including having its roof blown off by the Venetians), the Parthenon and its surroundings are still very impressive. I was sleepy at this point, and I even walked right by the Acropolis Museum without noticing it! Fortunately, they let me back in through the entrance gate so that I could get to it. Here were the originals, the statues that the Romans so often merely copied. I headed down over the rough, rocky ground to the northwest. A rocky overlook here has been so trampled over the centuries that the rocks are worn completely smooth and are incredibly slippery and treacherous. At the bottom, I entered the ancient Agora, with its relatively well preserved Doric Temple of Hephaistos. Another massive building here, the Stoa of Attalos, was reconstructed in the 1950s. To the east, I visited the Roman Forum, which houses a large octagonal Tower of Winds, a building which was put to a variety of uses (sundial, water clock, compass, weather vane).

I walked all the way east through Plaka, to Hadrian's Arch. Hadrian was quite an interesting character — elevating his young male lover Antinous to the status of a god after his early death. Somewhere I had seen a list of "stupid tourist" questions, for example: Is the Pope Catholic? Here I actually heard one of these, overhearing an American asking, So is the Parthenon older than the Colosseum in Rome? Amazing. Nearby are the remaining columns of the Temple of Olympian Zeus, but this closes quite early and so I wasn't able to get in today. I strolled east through the very green and leafy National Gardens by the Záppio and over to the Panathenaic Stadium, used when the Olympic Games were revived here in 1896.

Heading north around 17:00, I entered the very posh area of Kolonáki, perhaps the Pacific Heights of Athens. There is a funicular running up Lykavitós hill, but this runs infrequently. I didn't want to wait half an hour, so I just walked up the steep path, which takes roughly the same amount of time. Many large yucca trees jut fantastically out of the hillside. At the top are a lovely small church, a couple of cafés, and a fantastic view (though the Parthenon looks quite small in the distance, and the sun was almost directly behind it). Surveying the modern city of Athens, you find that many of the buildings are ugly blocks, hastily erected when the population exploded decades ago, but the fact that they're all white goes a long way towards making the place look beautiful, at least when you take it in as a whole. The color gives it a sort of heavenly tinge, not unlike San Francisco. High round ridges rise up to the east of the town. A layer of haze smothers the city. To the west and south, the coastline curves around in such a way that it really reminds me of looking out over Los Angeles from the San Gabriels or the Hollywood Hills, especially with the sun sinking low in the west, reflecting a bright orange color from the sea in the distance.

I stayed at the top of Lykavitós until the orange sun, almost at the horizon, disappeared behind a cloud. The wind was very chilly, but it felt much warmer at the base of the hill and in the city. I strolled around for a while, and then stopped for dinner at Gastra Taverna, in a cellar at the edge of the hill in Kolonáki. At 21:00, this was an early dinner by Greek standards — almost no one eats until 22:00. So I had the place to myself for a little while, and then someone came in celebrating their "Name Day". This seems to be celebrated like a birthday, but it is actually the special day for the saint after which the person is named. The place is lined with postcards from all over the world, and the owner is quite interesting. The food is very homey and excellent; I had a huge plate of lamb with cardamon.

To sample the Athenian nightlife, I walked all the way west about half an hour to Gazi. It's a trendy place to go in the evening, filled with very fashionable restaurants and clubs built in and around old warehouses. Here I visited the Blue Train. Downstairs is a nice relaxed bar, and upstairs is a dance club which turned out to have a young crowd. By midnight it got quite crowded, and I think there were only a handful of people in the place who were actually older than me. The walk back to the hotel later was very atmospheric, with the moon shining brightly and the floodlit Parthenon sitting imposingly above the city.

Jonathan's Travel Blog :: Europe

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51. Santorini, Athens

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