Astir Beach

This guide to Astir Beach in Athens starts in 1924, when children from a nearby orphanage playing on the sand dug up broken marble columns and an inscribed stone, and traces the excavation that followed to an ancient temple dedicated to Apollo under an unusual title tied to a myth about the goddess Leto. It then jumps to the 1950s, when an architect reshaped the same shoreline into a private beach club with colorful cabanas and seagull-shaped sunshades, and a ski school opened here in 1966. Best heard barefoot in the sand, near the water's edge.