We spent yesterday touring the city of Athens. Mainly, that meant visiting the Acropolis but we also visited the Olympic stadium and several other more modern landmarks like Parliament and the President’s house. The tour itself consisted of a lot of Greek history and mythology (our guide was excellent and very passionate about the subject matter) which I won’t rehash here since it’s available out on the intertubes.
After the jump are a few highlight pictures of what we saw.
This is a picture of the Acropolis (literally, “high point of the city”) from the West. We’re actually standing on a rock that the disciple Paul preached to the people of Athens from. Supposedly, Zeus held a trial for Ares in that same spot after Ares murdered a mortal.
Back in the day, this was where the sick came to be healed. It’s called the ‘Asklepieion’. It’s not on the top of the Acropolis, rather at the base of the North wall.
More or less next to the Asklepieion is the Theatre of Dionysis. That’s where they held the big entertainment events. In it’s prime, it held 57,000 people.
Here, we’re on the Acropolis and that’s the East side of the Parthenon. What remains of the Parthenon is more or less what was left after the Visigoth’s blew it up. Amazing really.
Here, we’ve got the Temple of Zeus. It’s not on the Acropolis, which can be seen in the background. It had a total of 104 columns like those shown here when it was built. These 16 are what remains. Several years ago, one of them was knocked down by a blot of lightening. The Greeks, even though it’s the present day, decided it was best not to fix it.
This is the Panathenaic stadium, built for the Olympics back in 1896 for the 1st Olympic games. The track is not like our modern tracks. In fact, it wasn’t even really a track. All of the events took place in the field in the middle, including the running events, the lengths of which changed bases on the number of times back and forth the runners ran the length of the field.