8 Go-to Resources About Things To Do In Athens

One author chronicles his voyage to the island of Ithaca, where Odysseus was when reputedly king.

I ENTERED a taxi on my arrival in Athens and pointed out the name of one of the city's most central five-star hotels. The motorist was tossed into a frenzy, and not just because he seemed to speak no English. As we zigzagged at high speed through the jampacked streets, he tapped frantically on his smartphone and athens tours started calling friends, none of whom were any assistance at all. When, finally, we pulled up at the entrance, I was greeted by a wild-haired, gesticulating front-desk male who said, "We're so sorry, sir. We have an issue, a big issue, today. So we have made a booking for you in our other hotel. Half a block away."

The issue, the cab driver conveyed, was that every toilet in the hotel had flooded.

In the elegant brand-new location where I wound up-- it took us 20 minutes to walk around the corner thanks to narrow, one-way streets-- I walked into an elevator to be confronted by 2 heavily bearded Orthodox priests completely clerical gown packed into the same small space, mobile phones extending from their pockets as they wished me, in easy English, "Good evening." The trouble of the little lanes I 'd just come through, the sunlit dishevelment of the structures, which appeared to be collapsing as much as rising up, the tombs in the middle of the city: I felt, quite happily, as if I were not in Europe but in Beirut or Amman.

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The real antiquity in Greece, I believed-- and this is its enduring blessing, for a visitor-- is its life; on this return journey, backtracking a course I 'd followed 35 years previously, from the classical sites of the Peloponnese (ill-starred Mycenae and healing Epidaurus) all the way to Odysseus' storied home on Ithaca, I was seeing that it's exactly the slow, human-scaled, rather broken-down nature of arrangements here that gives the country much of its human beauty. Yes, you can still see Caravaggio deals with around the Colosseum in Rome; along the ghats in Varanasi, India, you're amongst the clamor and piety of the Vedas. However in Greece, it's the absence of modern-day advancements-- of high-rises and high-speed innovations-- that can make you feel as if you're walking amongst the ancient theorists and tragedians who gave us our sense of hubris and catharsis.

Forget the reality that the Klitemnistra hotel is down the street from Achilles Parking; what really gives Greece its sense of being changeless is that the Lonely Planet manual offers you a cure for the wicked eye, and a guy is crossing himself furiously as he tries to double-park. The Grecian formula that keeps the location permanently young-- and old, and itself-- has less to do with the monuments of kings and gods than merely with the rhythms of the day: Fishing boats are going out before first light and the shepherd's boy is leading the priest's niece under the olive trees in the early morning. Black-clad females are gossiping in the shade and donkeys clop and stay ill-paved stones in the siesta-silent, sunlit afternoon. During the night, there's the clatter of pots from the tavernas and the noise of laughter under lights around the harbor.

All in a landscape where the deep blue sea surrounds you on every side, and the indigo and scarlet and orange flowerpots are brilliant with geraniums and begonias. It's not simply that you feel the presence of a rural past all over in Greece; it's that, amidst this elemental landscape of rock and cobalt sky and whitewashed church, you step out of the calendar completely and into the realm of allegory.

MY FIRST FULL day in Greece on this trip-- I have actually been going to the country for more than 50 years-- I made my method to Mycenae, the 3,300-year-old acropolis 75 miles from Athens that was the turbulent base for the House of Atreus. After five decades of reading about the slaughter of Agamemnon in his tub, I was cooled: by the stubby rocks throughout the prohibiting hillside, by the noise of the wind whipping in my ears, by the silence even amid the crowds. The entire website is monitory and plain, and the watchtower hilltops, produced spotting invaders, go with the tholos tombs and Bronze Age antiques that encircle the red-tiled rental properties of the Peloponnese.

Hardly 30 miles away, Epidaurus is tonic light to Mycenae's shadow, a reminder of why we cherish ancient Greece as the house of consistency and knowledge. I stepped into the sunken dorm known as the Abaton, inside Asclepius' sanctuary there-- the walls inform of visitors 24 centuries ago being recovered by their dreams-- and could not resist the alleviative spell. The amphitheater in the distance provides best percentages and acoustics; yellow butterflies were flitting between groves of trees along the so-called Sacred Way. Mycenae might be the black-and-blood-red landscape of Greek disasters, but Epidaurus offers us the clarity and higher geometry of Pythagoras. In Homer, of course, both worlds magically converge in stories of how individuals attempt to clear their minds of the bad imagine jealousy, murder and nostalgia.

Yet in all honesty, it remained in Nafplio, my daily base for these adventures throughout the Peloponnese, that I heard most regularly the whisper of the past. There was a raggedness to the narrow passageways of its Old Town, the uneven stones along its high staircases, that jolted me into a sense of intimacy; as I roamed around the climbing up lanes, I might hear bells clanging and the noise of cups rattling, a spoon versus a pan. The interiors of the little homes were dark, cozy, plain, and there was a Sunday-morning stillness that took me back to the unhurried corners of the world.

Crones were walking, arm in arm, down to the water as the sun declined, past coffee shops where 9 or 11 males sat together, nursing their little coffees in silence. Chants came down to us from a 15th-century shrine to the Virgin, tucked into a crag neglecting the sea. Candles flickered in little memorials along the waterfront, around framed pictures of lost kids, much as they might on the mountain roads of Bolivia.

Going back to my hotel space, I walked out onto my terrace and saw an onetime executioner's house in front of me, a few hundred yards across the water. Up above was the Palamidi castle, thick with jail cells and "murder holes" through which defending warriors could predict arrows and scalding water. Going to another hotel that morning, I 'd got out of the breakfast space and discovered myself on the battlements of a cluster of fortresses known to Venetians and Crusaders. Simply down the street, in the incense-haloed church, a painting recalled this as the website where the very first governor of an independent modern-day Greece had actually been assassinated, in 1831, by one aggressor bearing a knife, one bring a handgun.

GROWING UP IN England, I was encouraged to feel that Greece was the alpha and omega of the ancient world as my friends and I puzzled over its odd letters in our little green copies of Xenophon and Plato. My classmates routinely removed for Mount Athos, the separately ruled peninsula of 20 Orthodox monasteries that British travelers from Robert Byron and Patrick Leigh Fermor to William Dalrymple and, in reality, Prince Charles, have actually long haunted. Even now, one can view monks there observe the Julian calendar and tell the hours, as Colin Thubron keeps in mind in his recent novel, "Night of Fire," "in the old Byzantine mode."

The frescoes on the holy mountain "seemed to return us to a primitive, purer time," Thubron writes, "closer to bible," and this sense of Greece as an antechamber to the modern-day moment has actually never ever seemed to pass away. "There need to be a God," Bruce Chatwin wrote as he surveyed "an iron cross on a rock by the sea" on Mount Athos. The famously whimsical nomad startled his good friends by preparing to be baptized on the island; his funeral was kept in the icon-cluttered Orthodox Cathedral of St. Sophia in Central London.

I thought about all this as I began riding buses around the Peloponnese, advised at every turn that it's exactly what makes Greece something of an outlier in the European Union that gives it its practically Asian magnetism. The first time I boarded a long-distance bus, for the two-hour journey from Athens to Nafplio, more info I saw 6 good-luck appeals plastered on its windows and another dangling from the motorist's mirror. The trucks that passed us, as in India, bore hand-painted signs that said "God bless."

Raucous music was flooding through the aisles, and a sophisticated matron neighboring mumbled prayers to herself each time the driver started up. When I had to change buses at Corinth, the station ended up being a congested truck stop of sorts, with three "Toy Story" arcade games, a big photo of James Dean and some cheap plaster statues of Apollo and Athena next to mugs illustrating Che Guevara and the logo from "The Godfather."

Of course, the desire to show off antiquity-- and turn it to advantage-- is rarely shy in a nation that depends on tourism for its nourishment. On arrival in Nafplio, I found myself in a mess of signs promoting "traditional handmade ice-cream" and "standard hotels" (not a term that motivates confidence). In a town said to be more than 3,000 years old, founded (it's declared) by the kid of Poseidon, one shop used the boast "given that 1996" and another presented "conventional artist's healing fidget toy (inspired solely given that 1999)." There's a worry-bead museum in Nafplio-- not to be puzzled with the neighboring worry-bead workshop-- somewhere near the Antica Gelateria di Roma and the "ancient Greek" massage parlor featuring "Thai, shiatsu and reiki" treatments not, maybe, so familiar to Agamemnon or his partner.

However that was the point, actually. The adjectives Homer uses for Odysseus persistently are "crafty" and "resourceful" and "resilient"; it's only natural that his descendants market an "original wood-fired oven" on his house island of Ithaca. Certainly, a contemporary visitor might quickly believe that one factor the resourceful hero took a years to come home from the wars was that his ferryboat was continuously delayed.

NOBODY IN GREECE appears in a hurry to get anywhere. It took me a taxi, 2 long bus trips, two boats and another taxi-- 11 hours in all-- to get from Nafplio to my next base, Ithaca, few miles away, and nobody I spoke with knew when, or even whether, the bus or boat would ever show up. After I landed in Sami, on Cephalonia, the island that would cause its neighbor, where Odysseus reputedly lived, I joined a small group of travelers to wait, and wait, in the sun, water lapping versus our feet. No one attempted to sell us things, as they might in Port-au-Prince or Mumbai. We were back in a kid's box of amazing crayons, without any indications of industry or modernity to be seen.

When lastly I did set foot on Ithaca, the site that was somewhat wishfully said to be that of Odysseus' palace consisted of a hut and two buildings set across a barren hill. I managed to cadge a shared trip in among the island's only taxis, and when I showed up in the main town of Vathy, I asked a friendly travel agent about getting around. The bus, he informed me, had likely finished its run for the season (it was mid-September).

I decided, for that reason, to rent a cars and truck, and as I steered along the sheer, one-lane road that soon placed me high above the sea, a sheer drop before me-- no guardrail frequently-- I was shocked, once again and once again, by the heart-clenching appeal of the place. A big black canine extended behind the locked gate of a rental property, waiting for a modern-day returnee from the wars. No traffic showed up save for two black goats strutting throughout the asphalt and, lots of minutes later on, a man in a construction hat chugging along on his scooter at around 6 miles per hour. I concerned the Kathara Monastery, a remote chapel on a hill ignoring the sea, and the silence extended for miles.

As ever, the particular sites on Odysseus' island were enigmatic at best. Leaving the automobile on my method to the sensational mountaintop village of Exogi, I walked along an unpaved course to the "School of Homer," to be rewarded just by a ravishing view of olive trees and blue-green coves far listed below. In the small town of Stavros, a set of display screen boards included an essay titled "Ithaca: Conceptual Location." On Ithaca, the piece began, "the past nor the present exist. Today is not what one would consider modern, but it is positioned in a limbo. A truth that would choose to be up-to-date however is not able to be so." Noting that nobody really knows what existed here or didn't, the author went on, "On the island, there is Absolutely nothing! ... Absolutely nothing ..."

As it happens, I 'd brought in addition to me an American book to match all the classically trained Englishmen who have actually romanced Greece, and as I went through Don DeLillo's "The Names" for the 3rd time, I was cooled again by a sense that Greece represents something remote and strong in our collective memory. A single rock, the haunted novelist wrote, has "a power like a voice in the sky." "The light was surgical, it was binding," he writes early on. "It fixed the scene before me as a moment in a dream."

It's the wildness of Greece that overwhelms, the author seemed to acknowledge, not the so-called civilization. "I feel I have actually known the specific clearness of this air and water," says among his expat characters, very possibly a spy. "I've climbed up these stony courses into the hills." To which another replies, "There's a generic quality, an absoluteness. The bare hills, a figure in the distance."

The novel came out in 1982, and during that summer, I spent an entire month circumnavigating Greece, writing on the Peloponnese and the Ionian Islands for the $5-a-day trainee guidebook "Let's Go: Greece." It was a pivotal moment in my life; I 'd just turned 25, and I was leaving grad school at last to get a job in Manhattan. As I prepared for their adult years, I awakened prior to dawn most early mornings in a no-star hotel, went out to capture the first bus and rode along the coast to the next small town to look in on its sights and centers prior to heading off the next day. I've hardly ever understood a more dreamy and contemplative time.

At the end of my journey, my sweetheart of 6 years came by to Ithaca from Boston to join me. She looked more beautiful than ever, arms and legs golden in her pink sundress, which was because she 'd come to bid farewell. I was heading off into a new life, we both understood. We invested our days on the island of Odysseus' homecoming getting ready for a separation. After a long night at a taverna, under colored lights and grape leaves, she descended into a boat with a brand-new pal while I trudged back to our small hotel alone.

Now, as I looked around the island at the other end of life, I was impressed at how little it had actually altered. Yachties had actually found Vathy, the little primary town collected around a port, and blond Knightsbridgeites encircled the bust of Homer. There were boutique hotels now, and swimming pools. But the Circean rhythms and mythical features were no different from in the past. I entered into a market to buy peaches and chocolate and juice for a quiet supper in my space one evening and the bill concerned the equivalent of $2.30, as if I were back in my grandpa's time.

On surrounding Cephalonia, at the idyllic edge of Agia Efimia known as Paradise Beach, a whole scatter of pastel vacation homes has come up given that "Captain Corelli's Mandolin" (2001) was shot on the island, transforming its fortunes. However the fantastic little taverna established by Stavros Dendrinos still stands here, as it did 37 years back, and when I asked if I might remain in a small space above the restaurant, as before, Dendrinos's boy Nikitas, who runs it these days, said, "Now, no more. But if you want, you can remain in my uncle's house next door."

Four days later on, back on Ithaca, I sat on my terrace one early morning to view the island awaken. It never took place. Were Odysseus to come back next year, Penelope might barely search for from her loom, even as Telemachus asks the old guy if he knows of any great tasks in the city. In the absence of neon and traffic, we were back in something like Asclepius' sanctuary: a place in which to fall asleep and wake up, inexplicably clarified.