Monuments in Athens
1 monuments to discover with Bad Historian in Athens.
Athens Audio Experiences
Visit these monuments and more on a self-guided audio experience.
Athens in One Morning
Athens never knocked anything down. It just gave things a new job and carried on. The most famous building on earth was a temple, then a church, then a mosque, and then somebody decided it would make an excellent place to store gunpowder. This is the first-timer's walk, from Syntagma Square to the Panathenaic Stadium, told through the version the guidebook leaves out: a seventeen-year-old Bavarian handed a country he could not speak the language of, a hundred and ninety ballots found at the bottom of a well with the same name on every one, a two-thousand-year-old trophy that French monks used as a library and Byron used as a study, an arch that contradicts itself on opposite faces of the same stone, a temple that took six hundred and thirty-eight years and got looted before it was ever used, and a water carrier who won the first Olympic marathon and asked the King for a donkey cart. Ten stops, just under four kilometres, eight centuries. Nearly all of it is true. Six things are mine.
The Village That Appeared Overnight
Nothing in Plaka was built from scratch. The cathedral is made out of seventy-two churches Athens had just knocked down. There is a chapel with a nine-storey hotel standing on stilts over it, a Roman library that spent four hundred years as a bazaar, and a clock from the first century BC with a second clock inside it for cloudy days. The walk ends in Anafiotika, a whitewashed island village that island masons put up on the slope of the Acropolis in a single night, legally, because of a rule about roofs. Forty-five of the houses are still lived in, the lanes still have no names, and everybody's post arrives in one blue box.
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