Acropolis of Athens
Sacred hilltop citadel of marble temples crowned by the Parthenon, built for Athena in the fifth century BCE.
Location
About this audio guide
This guide to the Acropolis of Athens opens on the morning of April 27, 1941, when German soldiers raised a swastika flag over the ruins as Athens fell, and the local legend of a guard who leapt from the cliff rather than surrender his own flag. Five weeks later two students, Manolis Glezos and Apostolos Santas, set out from a city square with nothing but a pocketknife between them to reach that flagpole. They found a narrow crevice on the northwest side of the rock and slipped past the wire under cover of darkness. Best heard while facing that same northwest face of the cliff.
This audio guide was created using AI.
Similar places
Parthenon
Ancient Doric temple to Athena, its colonnade scarred by a seventeenth-century gunpowder blast.
Propylaea
Grand marble gateway to a sacred hilltop, left permanently unfinished by war and later wrecked by an explosion.
Temple of Athena Nike
Small Ionic shrine to the goddess of victory, perched on a bastion with sweeping views over the ancient gateway below.
Erechtheion
Marble temple porch where six sculpted maidens stand in place of columns, one still missing abroad.
Acropolis Museum
Glass-floored museum built on stilts above an excavated ancient neighborhood, its top gallery mirroring the Parthenon's lost sculptures.
Temple of Hephaestus
Best-preserved ancient Doric temple, dedicated to the god of blacksmiths, later a Byzantine church for a thousand years.