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