Athens Travel Blog

Last Sunday was gifted with the azure sky that makes this city a sometimes paradise. Families and tourists were outside to revel in the sun, ambling down the wide pedestrian pathways amidst balloon and roasted corn vendors.  At a quarter to eleven, as always, traffic through Syntagma stopped; distant...

The picture below might have you suspecting that Athens has been burned to the ground. No, no… it’s just the Olympiakos fans of legendary Thira 7, or Gate 7, doing their primeval war dance before a game against their hated rivals, Panathinaikos, the football club of Athens. The “Red...

Aegina is an island in the Saronic Gulf which can be seen from the top of Lykavittos Hill. By that I mean it’s really, very close. In ancient times Aegina and Athens had a dysfunctional on/ off again relationship, but now it’s both home to a few thousand islanders and the playground of Athenians,...

Syngrou Avenue is an unending chain of banks, car dealers, strip clubs, and as of December 2010, one of the most exciting additions to the Athens cultural scene in the last decade. The Onassis Cultural Centre is an exquisite building reflecting sky  by day and burning like an oil lamp at night allowing...

Rest in peace, 2010. Your last night has arrived. Those of us in Athens to see you off have many an option to celebrate your departure. Where the Party’s At Just beside the Academy of Arts and Sciences along Panepistimiou Ave is Omirou street. Turn in and go straight until you reach Cafe Boheme,...

On December 18th, the esteemed Jacqueline de Romilly, age 97, crossed over in a Western suburb of Paris. Her ardent passion of ancient Greece resulted in her being awarded Greek citizenship in 1995 and the title of “Ambassador of Hellenism” by the Greek state in 2000. Her departure came...

Funny fact about Athens: Christmas just wasn’t that big of a deal until King Otto came along in the nineteenth century, bringing a whole sackful of Bavarian customs and traditions along with him, like a Christmas tree just outside of the palace. It took! Every year the lighting of the Christmas...

Along with planting the seeds for a new museum and protecting 18th-century architecture, Melina Mercouri (“the Last Greek Goddess”) commissioned the start of what was to be one of the world’s best open-air museums: a traffic-free, uninterrupted pathway encircling the most sacred ground...

Maybe you’re just on a romantic trip in Athens, Greece, or maybe you’ve met someone and have had a whirlwind romance, the kind written about in beach blanket paperbacks. Whatever the case, you’ve got something to say to someone you’re quite fond of and you want to do it in a way...

Should your eyes rest on a gentleman in Athens of any age who is in a state of deep conversation, heavy thinking, sitting, waiting, or watching, (common activities for anyone in Greece) it’s likely that he’s complementing the activity with a long string of beads and a graceful flip of the...