Days 16 and 17 (11 and 12 June)

We decided before we got here that we would not be visiting the Acropolis and associated museums... The tickets are expensive; the system is fiendishly complicated; and there's the ominous "how to skip the line" advice that always scares me away. Just as we have yet to visit the Forbidden City, despite three trips to Beijing, so we also decided that seeing the Acropolis up close and personal would have to wait for another opportunity.

So our Athens stay so far has divided into two. There's tourist Athens. And there's ordinary Athens.

The former is awash with things to see, but frankly a bit frenetic. The latter has proved unexpectedly charming.

A guaranteed crowd-pleaser in tourist Athens is the changing of the Presidential Guard in the square outside the Greek Parliament. It's balletic, rather than militaristic. The big ceremony is on Sundays, but every hour you get a truncated version of the pageantry. The everyday uniform consists of the doulama (a skirted tunic), tsarouchia (heavy, clog-like, nail-studded shoes), the epiknemides (stockings), the farion (a tasselled cap), and a 5-kilo Garand gun.







Then you're ineluctably sucked towards the Acropolis. You're either approaching it, or circling it, or viewing it from afar. As you progress, you keep encountering ancient and picturesque things.












There are a couple of things that struck me especially.

One is the Lysicrates Choragic Monument, which is surrounded by interesting stories.


It was erected by the patron of musical performances in the Theater of Dionysos, to commemorate the first prize won by one of his sponsored performances in 335/334 BC, and in the 17th century it was incorporated into a French Capuchin monastery. After two British architects published detailed drawings of the monument in a book that came out in 1762, it became quite well known, and apparently features in several English landscape gardens. Byron -- he of Newstead Abbey and Hucknall churchyard fame -- was a guest in the monastery for a few months in 1810, and it is where he wrote Maid of Athens, addressed to an unconscionably young woman from the household where he had previously lodged, one Teresa Makri. (Her fame notwithstanding, she subsequently struggled to escape poverty.)

Other notable facts about this monastery are that one of its friars planted Greece's first tomato plants in its garden in 1818, and the monks offered the monument to a touring Englishman in 1829, but dismantling and shipping it was deemed too problematic. (Lord Elgin later attempted to buy it, but unsuccessfully.)

Another very interesting site is the Areopagus, a low hill northwest of the Acropolis, which became the meeting place for, and therefore gave its name to, an aristocratic council of ancient Athens. The New Testament records that the Apostle Paul preached here. Having heard him holding forth in the marketplace, a group of philosophers began to debate with him, and invited him to speak before the council, at its customary venue. (It's an exemplary sermon: "The God who made the world and everything in it is the Lord of heaven and earth and does not live in temples built by human hands..." And so on. Stirring stuff...)



A third must-do is Lycabettus Hill. Everyone recommends going there for sunset. So that's the busy period... Much better, in our view, is to arrive early in the morning. If you're there by 8.30, you'll share the hilltop with a few joggers, a couple of Greek soldiers trying to figure out how to raise the flag (and then hoisting it aloft after a simple little ceremony), and a voluble old lady who apparently looks after St George's Chapel.






Kind of half-way between "tourist Athens" and "everyday Athens" is the National Garden. A few tourists escape there for a rest, but mostly it's locals. In and around live parrots and tortoises.





Our neighbourhood is called Vyronas -- and it turns out it is named after none other than George Gordon, Lord Byron himself.

Up here, you see very few tourists... You can down a freddo cappuccino, and check out the various memorials, Byronic and otherwise, safe in the knowledge that you're far away from guides and followers.





In our 'hood and its vicinity, there are hosts of flowering trees, steep little streets, orange trees, and scenic staircases:





It's all very compact. For example, there's a multi-level tangle of courtyards outside our kitchen window. It's hard to tell what belongs to whom. One area is fitted out as a paved garden. There's a vertiginously twisty staircase that leads to a higher level. If you stand on our tiny back balcony of a morning, you can hear the cooing and flapping of the pigeons, and the soap opera that some neighbour is watching. Greek is surprisingly "shushy".





I'm really enjoying staying here, and the pleasure comes every bit as much from the everyday as it does from the famous.