Acropolis and Other Ancient Sites

As any history buff knows, this is the place to go to see old stuff. There are many options when it comes to admissions into these sites, one of which offers you entry into seven different locations for 30 euro. We decided, however, to spend our 30 euro on just the Acropolis entry and entry into the Acropolis Museum. The rest of the stuff you can get a decent enough view of just by walking past it so we didn’t think it was necessary to go inside. I will start by saying that the Acropolis is AMAZING! To stand in front of the Parthenon and be surrounded by these monuments that make you realize just how minuscule the span of one life is, is just a dream. If you ever get the chance to make it to Athens, I highly recommend you check out the museum as well. It was brilliantly done and has great views of the Acropolis from its massive windows. Kaitlyn had found a site that recommended doing the museum first, before the actual Acropolis (which we didn’t do in order to beat the tourists…) and starting at the third floor (which we did do and it turned out to be great advice). Check out the pictures below!

The Acropolis Museum

As I mentioned above, this museum was brilliantly done. If you look closely at the first picture below, you can see the large building in the center. The top story of the building was the third floor of the museum which the squared off to align parallel to the Parthenon. You can see in the fifth picture below that the Parthenon is visible from the windows of the building. Then, around the perimeter of this floor, they placed pieces of the original sculptures in the locations where they would have been if they were still in the actual Parthenon. They filled in some of the missing pieces of the sculptures with plaster, but others the left as just pieces. It was such a clever way to display these artifacts! The last four pictures are ruins of an ancient neighborhood that they found as they started breaking ground to build the museum. Apparently any time new construction begins, if the builders run into ruins they are required to pay for those ruins to be put on display if they plan to still build on top of them. The museum got lucky and just had another bit of history to put on display!