Most island-bound travellers give Athens one night and treat it as a chore — a place to sleep between a long-haul flight and a ferry. That is a mistake, and an easily fixed one, because two days is enough to turn the city from a transit point into the reason some people come back.
The reputation problem is old and mostly out of date. Athens was, for a long time, a hot and traffic-choked city that visitors endured for the Acropolis. Then it acquired a pedestrianised archaeological promenade linking almost every classical site, a metro built for the 2004 Olympics that is fast and cheap, and a generation of restaurants and bars in neighbourhoods that nobody used to walk through. The ruins have not moved. Everything around them has.
Two days, structured below, covers the classical core, the two collections that matter, and enough of the modern city to know what you are looking at.
Before you start: two practical decisions
Where to stay. Koukaki, immediately south of the Acropolis, is the best all-round base — residential, walkable to everything, well served by the metro at Syngrou-Fix and Akropoli, and full of places locals eat. Monastiraki and Psyrri are more central and considerably louder at night. Plaka is charming and expensive and largely populated by other visitors. Avoid the immediate area around Omonia at night if you are unsure.
The combined ticket. A single multi-site ticket covering the Acropolis, the Ancient Agora, the Roman Agora, Hadrian's Library, Kerameikos and the Temple of Olympian Zeus is sold at any of those sites and is valid over several days. If you intend to see more than two of them it pays for itself immediately, and it lets you enter the smaller sites on a whim rather than weighing each one up.
Day one: the classical core, early
Be at the Acropolis for opening. In summer that means being in the queue before eight, which sounds unreasonable and is the single most valuable piece of advice on this page. By ten the rock is hot, exposed and full, and the marble underfoot is polished to the point of being genuinely slippery. Before nine it is quiet enough to hear the wind.
Ninety minutes on the rock itself is enough. The Parthenon is permanently under some degree of restoration and has been for decades; the scaffolding is part of the experience now. Do not skip the Erechtheion on the north side, which is the more interesting building architecturally, or the view south to the sea from the far wall.
Then descend to the Acropolis Museum, which is directly below and is the correct order — the site first, then the objects that came off it. The top floor is built to the exact dimensions and orientation of the Parthenon, so the surviving frieze is displayed in its original arrangement, with plaster casts standing in for the sections held in London. Whatever you think about that argument, the room makes it more legible than any amount of reading.
Lunch in Koukaki or Makrigianni, both a few minutes' walk.
In the afternoon, the Ancient Agora. This is where Athens actually happened — the market, the law courts, the place Socrates argued — and it is quieter, greener and more atmospheric than the Acropolis above it. The Temple of Hephaestus at the top of the site is the best-preserved Doric temple anywhere, largely because it spent centuries as a church. The reconstructed Stoa of Attalos along the eastern edge houses a small museum and, more usefully, a long shaded colonnade.
Walk out through Monastiraki — flea market, junk shops, and one of the better rooftop views back up to the Acropolis — and into Psyrri for dinner.
Day two: the city rather than the ruins
Start at the National Archaeological Museum, north of the centre near Victoria metro. This is the most important collection in the country by some distance — the Mycenaean gold from Schliemann's excavations, the bronze Zeus or Poseidon from Cape Artemision, the Antikythera mechanism — and it is consistently less crowded than the Acropolis Museum because it is a twenty-minute walk from the tourist axis. Allow two hours. Three if you like bronzes.
Then walk. The afternoon is deliberately unstructured, and the choice is between four neighbourhoods:
Exarcheia, immediately east of the museum, is the anarchist and student quarter — political murals, second-hand bookshops, small record stores and a square that has been the centre of Greek protest culture for fifty years. It has a reputation that outruns the reality in daylight hours.
Kolonaki, south-east, is the opposite: expensive, well-dressed, with the good commercial galleries and a funicular up Lycabettus Hill, which is higher than the Acropolis and gives the view that includes it. Go up for sunset if the timing works.
Koukaki and Pangrati are where Athenians live and eat. Pangrati in particular, around the old marble stadium, has the highest concentration of unglamorous excellent restaurants in the city.
Kerameikos and Gazi, west, combine the ancient cemetery — an unexpectedly beautiful and almost empty archaeological site — with the converted gasworks that anchor the city's nightlife.
Eating, briefly
Athens eats late. A restaurant at eight in the evening will be empty and will still be filling at eleven. Booking is rarely necessary except at weekends.
The things worth ordering are not the things on the tourist menus. Souvlaki from a proper grill shop, wrapped, eaten standing up. Mezedes — a table of small plates rather than a main course each — at a mezedopoleio, which is the format most Greek meals actually take. Greek coffee in the afternoon, served with a glass of water and not intended to be finished to the bottom of the cup. Wine by the half-kilo from the barrel, which is how it is measured and which is better than it sounds.
The Varvakios central market on Athinas Street, open in the mornings, is worth walking through even if you buy nothing: meat and fish halls on one side, spices and dried goods opposite, and a couple of long-running canteens in the middle that serve the traders.
If you have a third day
Two options, and they are different in kind.
Cape Sounion, at the southern tip of Attica, has the Temple of Poseidon standing alone on a headland above the sea. Buses run from central Athens and take around two hours along the coast. It is the standard sunset excursion and it earns the reputation.
Aegina, forty minutes by ferry from Piraeus, gives you an hour of island life without committing to the Cyclades — a harbour, a Doric temple in the hills, and pistachio orchards. It is also a useful trial run for the ferry system if you are heading out to the islands afterwards.
A third possibility, if you are travelling with anyone who is done with antiquity: the coastal tram down to Faliro and the beaches at Glyfada and Vouliagmeni, which is where Athenians go in summer and which very few visitors ever see.
Getting around
The metro is fast, cheap, air-conditioned and covers everything in this itinerary. Line 3 runs directly from the airport to Syntagma and Monastiraki, which makes the arrival straightforward. Buy a paper ticket or a reloadable card at any station and validate it before boarding.
The archaeological promenade — Dionysiou Areopagitou and Apostolou Pavlou — is pedestrianised and links the Acropolis, the Odeon, the Agora and Thissio in one continuous walk. It is the reason central Athens is more pleasant on foot than its traffic reputation suggests.
For where the ferries go next and how the island groups connect, see Greek island hopping by ferry. For timing the wider trip, Santorini in the shoulder season makes the case for travelling either side of the peak.
