Academy of Athens
Neoclassical marble temple of columns, statues and painted halls, twenty six years in the building.
Location
About this audio guide
This guide to the Academy of Athens follows twenty-six years of marble carving that ended in 1885 with a striking building and no institution to move in. It traces Simon Sinas, a Greek banker living in Vienna, who began funding the project in 1856 and hired Danish architect Theophil Hansen to echo the temples up on the Acropolis, and his wife Ifigeneia, who kept the money flowing after his death. Look up at the two columns before you, with Athena and Apollo keeping watch, and marble Plato and Socrates seated in conversation below.
This audio guide was created using AI.
Similar places
Vallianeio Megaron
Doric marble temple with twin curved staircases, built as a neoclassical home for a national book collection.
Zappeion Hall
Neoclassical exhibition hall with a columned atrium, built beside an ancient temple to revive the Olympics.
Propylaea
Grand marble gateway to a sacred hilltop, left permanently unfinished by war and later wrecked by an explosion.
Parthenon
Ancient Doric temple to Athena, its colonnade scarred by a seventeenth-century gunpowder blast.
Stoa of Attalos - Museum of the Ancient Agora
Reconstructed two-story marble colonnade housing finds from the ancient marketplace beneath modern Athens.
Metaxourgeio
Former silk mill turned neoclassical art gallery, anchoring a once-industrial arts district.