“The worst thing about being a tourist is having other tourists recognise you has a tourist.” 

Athens and, in particular, the Acropolis, is one of those ‘must see, bucket list’ icons. You feel you’ve seen it even without ever having been there. The Parthenon, with its instantly recognisable columns has to be one of the most famous monuments on the planet. Why haven’t we been here before? Amazingly, the Acropolis has been inhabited since the Bronze Age, but it’s the Parthenon, built in the 5^th Century BCE during the ‘Golden Age of Pericles’ – making this structure around 2,500 years old – that puts this place on the map – for all time. 

We’re here for a 3-day break on our way to the Greek Islands. Our apartment has the most stunning view directly across towards the Acropolis – so one of those eponymous ‘Rooms with a View’. It positively beams in the bright mid-May sunshine, and at night it emanates a golden light. We’re itching to get over there. It’s not too hot at this time of the year, a very comfortable 22-24, so nothing like the baking heat of high Summer, so does that mean crowds…?

OK, some hard truths. There are necessary strategies to limit the crush. If you can get there early, say 8am or thereabouts, you’ll queue for a ticket and pay €30 to enter the site – doesn’t include the Museum. Though this was still for a timed entry at 10.45am, go figure – so we cooled our heels wandering around the Plaka. Beware though, there are loads of scam sites online. We saw one man front up to the ticket counter with a print-out having paid €90 on tickets only to be told the website was a fake (one of many)! There was also a Russian woman alongside the queue trying to ‘offload’ two tickets (didn’t need them anymore – really!?) naturally for cash and for slightly less money. Scam Alert! Eventually, the long remarkably patient ill-formed queue for the 10.45/11am entry assembled and then the throngs (including us of course) pushed through the gates and began the long dusty climb up the Acropolis. 

As Jean-Paul Sartre once said “Hell is other people”, and I’m afraid you begin to know what he meant…

The walk up the Acropolis in the morning heat was, I’m afraid, more of a shuffle, made even more congested as we approached the Parthenon with people coming down the same path as we other mortals headed up! I’m not sure how this supposed ‘timed entry’ works, because there seemed to be thousands of people clambering over the site – albeit lightly held back from the actual marble itself. The answer is the entry might be timed but the exit isn’t. And of course the tour groups were there with the obligatory umbrella held aloft. At this rate, there’ll be nothing left of the Acropolis in years to come, it’ll be worn away! 

Still, it is indeed a massively impressive collection of buildings set high up above the city, with clear views of the city sprawling beneath, the sea in the near distance and the mountains beyond. This would have been the most impressive structure in the world in its time – gleaming white marble with highly coloured relief paintings and, in at its very heart, a giant 12-metre gold statue of Athena herself. It was an amazing, if somewhat frustrating experience with the crowds, but then it is a once in a lifetime experience. And another – a positive aspect of being a tourist – not until you actually go there do you understand how such a famous site reveals itself. There are always surprises.