Our Final Day in Athens: The Museum of Cycladic Art

During our last couple of days in Naxos, I began thinking about how I might like to spend our last day in Athens – we were to arrive at 6 PM; Sam and Nafisa and their children would need to leave for the airport at 2:30 for their flight home, and we would have to leave at about 7:30 for our flight home. I thought about where we might have dinner with Sam and Nafisa and the kids, but also what we we might do together the following day, and what Nancy and I might do on that final afternoon.  I had been reading in my archeology book, Ancient Greece: An Explorers Guide, about some ruins just to the west of the Acropolis that might be fun to explore.  And maybe we could go past the Parliament building atop Syntagma Square, letting Abe see the costumed Evzones perform the full Sunday morning ceremonial changing of the guard, with their fancy uniforms. And I was thinking that maybe we could end up at the Museum of Cycladic Art, because – I admit it–  ever since I first saw the Cycladic collection at the very beginning of our tour of the National Archeological Museum, I had developed an admiration for those figures.  It turned out that the Cycladic collection was but part of what that museum had to offer.


Well, those plans were mostly out the window, not least because of our late arrival thanks to Olympic Airways’ incompetence, as well as the delay in our luggage due to Olympic’s incompetence-at-best.  We had to wait at the apartment until we could find out that our luggage was in, and getting the luggage; there were contents that needed to be sorted between Sam and Nafisa’s bags and our own.  And then there was the extreme heat – Athens was so hot that they closed the Acropolis to keep tourists safe.

We heard by late morning that all of our luggage had reached Athens airport on early and mid-morning flights out of Naxos, but it remained uncertain whether it would be delivered to us by the time Sam and Nafisa had to head back to the airport, so we told the luggage service that we would pick up our luggage just before checking in for our flights that afternoon and evening.  That would also make it unnecessary to get a big van to take Sam and Nafisa out to the airport.  Still, we lingered in the nicely air-conditioned apartment, having leftovers for lunch, until it was time for Sam and Nafisa to leave for the airport .  Nancy and I then decided that we would spend our afternoon at the Cycladic Museum.

Our final day in Naxos -- and the nightmare getting back to Athens

Our last day in Naxos began uneventfully.  Because no other users were going in that date, our VRBO host had felt able to given us an extended checkout time on our apartment, for a fairly modest upcharge that I didn’t mind.  Most of that time was spent packing, and giving the grandchildren the chance to nap before we left for our late afternoon flight back to Athens.  But intrepid tourist Paul I couldn’t bear to spend the day without ANY sightseeing, so I headed out alone to see an archeological site, the Mitropolos Site Museum.  Located across the square from the Naxos Cathedral, built in 1787,

I entered without any admission fee after going down a set of steps from the square.  The place was comparable to the excavations under the floor of the outside of the Acropolis Museum, but with free entry.  There was series of clear panels in an underground area in Mitropolis Square that ran above and beside an excavation of buildings in the ancient Mycenaean city that once flourished at the location; other levels of the excavation show how the site was used around 700 BC as well as into the Roman era in the final years for the that millennium.  Instead of the artifacts being housed separately, they were left where they were found in the site, because the roof over the site could be trusted to preserve them from the elements

A Visit to the Sacred Island of Delos (and touristy Mykonos)

This morning we headed off by ferry to see Delos (note that the pronunciation in Greek more closely approximates “THEE-lose”).  Coming from Naxos, it appears that the only way to visit Delos is to take an 8:45 AM ferry that stops off in Paros, then heads to Delos where the tourist has a three hour window, then to Mykonos, where there is another three-hour window), then back to Paros for a passenger drop and pick-up, and finally back to Naxos at about 6 PM   – a full day of touring.  We had a quick breakfast in our apartment, then walked down to the waterfront to catch our ferry.

Our first stop, after a half-hour on the water, was Paros town

where a few passengers got off, appearing to be dressed for a day at the beach, and a goodly number of passengers boarded, apparently bound for Delos

This church on the end of a spit of land looked as if it might be an interesting destination had we been on Paros – with the benefit of a car!

An hour later, we approached the rather barren-looking island of Delos

and we left ashore with the strict warning that we were to be back on board by 1:15 PM – not a second later, because we leave at 1:15 and not at 1:16!

Both the travel agent at Zas travel, who had sold us the ferry tickets, and the trust guidebook that was using as my main guide to ruins beyond Athens and Delphi, Ancient Greece: An Explorers’ Guide, strongly recommended attaching ourselves to an English-speaking guide to help us understand the island better.  The site, we were told, was poorly signed. And besides, said the travel agent, the guide can get you into the site without waiting in a long ticket line.  But although we had been led by this comment to expect to find a passel of guides trying to hawk their services outside the entrance gate, none appeared as we approach the ticket window, and the ticket line was nice and short.  So, we bought our tickets and went in, hoping to find a guide inside.  We saw several small groups with guides.

Yet each of the guides we approach told us curtly that she (most of the guides were women) had a pre-existing arrangement with the small group to which she was talking (and with whom, apparently, they had traveled to Delos on either our own ferry or one that had arrived at almost the same time), and no, we could not join them.  So, after maybe 15 to 20 minutes of this, we gave up on finding a guide and did a self-guided tour.

And in the end, this was probably a good choice.  The map provided with our tickets not only had a fair amount of detail identifying a hundred separate items, but has three separate walking routes suggested , for walks of 90 minutes, 3 hours and five hours, respectively.  In addition, the signage along the way was not bad - better than at Knossos, for example.  And using the map, and the signs, along with walking guides copies from the Rough Guide, Fodor’s and the Explorers Guide, we felt that we were able to see and understand the place pretty well, and we were able to move at our own pace.  My guess is that we saw a good deal more than any of the tourists who were seeing the site with a guide.

Visiting the interior of Naxos

Fourth Century Church of Panagia Drosiani, Naxos

  Our group was firmly committed to spending part of our Greek vacation on one of the Aegean Islands.  I chose Naxos for this final part of our Greek vacation for two reasons: first, it was within a reasonable ride from the sacred island of Delos, which was high on my must-see list for this trip, and because it seemed to have the greatest variety of potential sight-seeing, to be more than just a tourist and beach-going island.  Today and the next day were to provide our chance to explore beyond the town of Chora: today the interior of Naxos, and tomorrow a ferry ride to Delos. 

We made our arrangements for both (as well as for our airport drop off on our final day). with the Zas tourist agency, which had a couple of offices along the Chora waterfront.  We hired both a driver and a guide, and woman named Mina, for our tour of the island.  I would say that our tour guide was OK, but only OK.  She seemed to know what she was talking about, and she was animated with a deep pride in her island.  She was a bit repetitive, and she had plainly her own ideas about what we should see.  She was I think a bit taken aback by the fact that I had prepared for our visit by researching the possible sights of Naxos, as well as by the extent of my knowledge about ancient Greece.  She was somewhat  willing to take direction to head to some of the sights about which I had read on preparation for our trip.  Not enough direction, perhaps.

On the way out of and back to Chora, we passed these terraced hillsides

Sightseeing in Naxos Town (Chora)

We woke up this morning planning a family walk into the Kastro, the Venetian castle area that tops the hill at the center of old-town Chora (from looking at guidebooks, it appears that the main town on a number of different Aegean Island is named Chora.  I gather that this is a practice followed when the official name of the town is the same as the island -- it  enables them to distinguish between the name of the town and the name of the island).  We had our usual Greek breakfast—yogurt (Greek-style yogurt, of course, but creamier and without the somewhat sharp bite that Greek yogurt often has in the United States) with granola and fruit.  Then, we were on our way. 

The free map that our apartment host had provided to us was barely adequate to the task, so I picked up a much better map for 3 euros, showing detail including street names in Chora (and apart from our own neighborhood, the streets were signed, to some extent, in some other parts of the old city below with Kastro (the Bourgos) and within the Kastro itself.

We passed by these churches

and then we were into the narrow lanes of the Bourgos, trying to find our way to one of the two gates into the Kastro.

Travel to Naxos

This is a holding page for an eventual post, transferred from my temporary blog, about the trip from Crete to Naxos

Several more posts about travel in Greece are linked here

For a reason that could not figure out at the time, I was locked out of my regular Google account while we were traveling.  Rather than taking the time to understand and fix the problem, I created a second travel blog at paulalanlevy2.blogspot.com.

Twelve posts about our time in Athens, Delphi, and Crete appear there.  If I can do so, I have in mind to import them here.  But for now, here are links to those posts

The Athens Acropolis

 Exploring the Ancient Agora

A Visit to Ancient Sites in the Peloponnese

The Acropolis Museum in Athens

Some Highs and Lows of Travel in Athens

Benaki Museum in Athens, and Excavation under the Acropolis Museun

A Road Trip to Delphi and Housos Loukas

Heraklion Arrival and Relaxing in Rethymno

A Hike in the Patsos Gorge of Agios Antonios

The Palace of Knossos and Visiting Heraklion

Last Two Days in Rethymno, Including the Fortezza and Archeological Museum

Our Trip From Rethymno on Crete to Naxos

A walk around tourist Athens

We spent our first full day in Athens walking around the maim tourist neighborhoods of Plaka, Anafiotias and Monastiriaki, following a audio guide narrated by Rick Steves.  We began with a lazy morning, catching up on sleep, adjusting to a new time zone seven hours ahead of Eastern Daylight Time, breakfasting on yogurt with granola.  We did not emerge from our apartment until nearly noon.  It looked cloudy and threatening rain, but buoyed by a weather forecast that put the chances of rain as no more than 10% or 20%, we took no rain gear.

We began by checking out a small Russian Orthodox church just across Fililennon Street from the street where our apartment, the Ekklisia Agia Triada Rosiki

Our first day in Athens

Having spent an entire semester studying classical Greece as part of my first year Humanities program at Reed College, Greece has long been on my bucket list of places to see during my lifetime, and this summer we are gathering with our family in Greece, planning to spend roughly a week in each of Athens, Crete and Naxos.  We arrived in Athens this afternoon after a flight in on Scandinavian Airlines by way of Copenhagen.  We have taken a three bedroom apartment near Syntagma Square; after unpacking and winding down for am hour or so, we set out to get our first taste of the city.

We strolled out along Mitropoleos, pausing for an ice cream near the Syntagma Square and getting directions for a grocery store where we could stock up for the next few days’ breakfasts.  Proceeding back in the direction of the Acropolis, we came upon the 19th Century Athens Cathedral

Athens Cathedral with Acropolis in rear

Athens Cathedral

Square in front of Athens Cathedral

Five days on the beaches of Guanacaste Province

this is a holding page