Acropolis Museum
Step inside and the floor is already a dig site — the building sits directly over excavated ruins of Roman and early Byzantine Athens.
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4,250 artifacts across 14,000 square metres trace the Acropolis rock from the Bronze Age through Byzantine Greece. The dedicated Parthenon Marbles gallery was the museum's founding purpose: Greece needed a credible venue to press its case for sculptures still held at the British Museum in London.
What to look for
- Archaeological remains of Roman and early Byzantine Athens lie directly beneath the building — the museum was constructed over them.
- The Parthenon Marbles gallery — the political centrepiece that drove decades of architectural competitions and the museum's entire design brief
- Artifacts spanning the Greek Bronze Age through Roman and Byzantine periods in one continuous collection
At 14,000 sq metres across multiple floors, budget at least a half-day; the museum opened 20 June 2009.
Acropolis Museum is one of 36 sights worth the detour in Athens, all bundled offline in Voyage GO — download the Athens pack and it sits on your map with no signal, filling your travel passport the moment you walk past.
More to see in Athens
- ParthenonA temple built to celebrate a war victory that went on to become a church, a mosque, and a gunpowder depot — blown apart in 1687 and still being reassembled.
- Acropolis of AthensA flat-topped rock 150 m above the city where Pericles spent the 5th century BC erecting the buildings that still define Athens.
- Platonic Academy (Akadimia Platonos)Aristotle studied here for twenty years before leaving to found his own school — and the word "academy" has followed ever since.
- Classical AthensDemocracy was invented here in 508 BC — and it took a bribe at Delphi to get it started.
- Olympic Stadium Athens "Spyros Louis"Santiago Calatrava's white steel roof arches over the same track where Athens opened the 2004 Olympics — and hosted three Champions League finals.
- ErechtheionThe one Greek temple that broke every rule of classical architecture — and scholars still can't agree on what it was actually called.