14 curated walks, written to be listened to on foot. Open one and the guide talks as you walk — where to go, what you are looking at, and why it is there. Each one runs between two stations, so you can start from either end.
3 stops · 30 min · 792 m
Three stops along the promenade under the Acropolis, about half an hour and free: the museum built to face the rock and show what is missing from it, the theatre one rich Athenian cut into the slope for his dead wife, and the bare hill where Athens tried murder and an invading army shot fire at the citadel.
2 stops · 15 min · 199 m
Two stops, a quarter of an hour, told from the street: a temple that took six hundred years to finish and lost a column to an Ottoman governor's lime kiln, and the arch the city put up for the emperor who finished it — with one face calling this the city of Theseus and the other the city of Hadrian.
15 stops · 1 h 55 min · 1.9 km
Athens's old town, walked downhill through its landlords: the Ottoman bazaar at Monastiraki and the mosque whose lime cost a governor his post; the Roman market that became the sultans' town centre; the islanders' village built under the Acropolis for a Bavarian king; and Hadrian's half-millennium temple, short one column.
4 stops · 30 min · 419 m
Four buildings, half an hour: the parliament the young state built for itself and ran out of money for, and three marble temples of learning on the next avenue that private donors paid for instead — one of which stood for forty years with nothing inside it.
12 stops · 2 h 5 min · 3 km
How a new kingdom built a capital it couldn't pay for: a library, an academy and a university given by Greeks abroad; the palace that became the parliament that limited its king; a marble stadium rebuilt by one merchant for the first modern Olympics; and the emperor who finished Athens's biggest temple.
5 stops · 35 min · 717 m
Five stops, about half an hour, from Aiolou Street down into Plaka: the church that stood in as the new capital's cathedral, the Byzantine church a straight street was meant to demolish, the cathedral said to be built from the marble of seventy-two others, the tiny church next door made of ancient stone, and the last Ottoman-era mansion in Athens, home of the family of the saint the cathedral keeps.
2 stops · 25 min · 433 m
Two stops, twenty-five minutes: a marble stadium where the modern Olympics opened, and the hall paid for by the man who tried to bring the Games back a generation earlier — and was dead before his first one opened.
8 stops · 1 h 30 min · 2.7 km
The free, car-free walk at the foot of the Acropolis, from Hadrian's arch along Dionysiou Areopagitou to the hills where Athens argued: a museum built to face the Parthenon, a Roman music hall where Maria Callas sang under occupation, the rock where Ares and Saint Paul were tried and heard, and the quarried hillside where every citizen could ask to speak.
4 stops · 50 min · 2.2 km
A traverse over Philopappos Hill, about forty minutes and free: a chapel named after a cannon, a rock-cut house that was never Socrates's prison, the summit where Macedonians, Venetians and Greek fighters each aimed at the Acropolis, seven seats in the rock marked 'public', and the refugee quarter at the foot of the far side, built from the stones of a burned naval school.
4 stops · 30 min · 478 m
Half an hour climbing through Plaka, where everything survived because somebody found a use for it: Roman columns in front of a church lent to monks from Sinai, a prize monument saved by being built into a convent, a bell hidden from the Ottomans that rang for the first free Easter, and at the top a Cycladic village that island masons built on the slope of the Acropolis. Steep lanes and steps; not step-free.
4 stops · 25 min · 159 m
Twenty-five minutes round Monastiraki Square, where the market has stood for two thousand years and only the landlord changes: an emperor's library that became the governor's seat and a bazaar of a hundred shops, the governor's mosque and the column that cost him his job, the smiths' street, and the little convent whose nuns' cloth stalls seeded the market and gave the square its name.
4 stops · 35 min · 606 m
Half an hour around one building: the square that named itself after what it demanded from the man upstairs, the plain palace a king's father paid for with a red pencil in hand, the tomb a republic cut into the royal forecourt, and the queen's private garden with its gate thrown open.
5 stops · 30 min · 391 m
Half an hour round the outside of the Roman Agora, where a Roman marketplace became the middle of Ottoman Athens and every building survived by changing its job: a gate renamed for the bazaar, the Conqueror's mosque turned barracks and bakery, a school turned prison, a clock turned dervish lodge — and the one hammam that kept doing what it was built for.
3 stops · 25 min · 545 m
A short traverse over the hills west of the Acropolis, about half an hour and free: the quarried hillside where the Athenian Assembly met and an astronomer watched the sun, a quiet hill named by a line cut in its rock, and the observatory the new Greek state put where the oldest one had been.