Yesterday, we woke up a little late. We almost missed breakfast at our hostel, and the sun had already found us when we left the building. Again, we decided not to visit the Acropolis for now. The way up is a bit long, and because of the heat and the many tour groups waiting at its entrance made us decide to either visit it on Saturday morning or after the week of EasyCruise on the Aegean Sea. Right now, I can tell you that we will do the last.

The entrance ticket we bought at the Temple of Olympic Zeus on Thursday grants you access to a large number of places here in Athens, and one of them is the Ancient Agora site. This place can be seen from Acropolis as it is right next to it, and was once the booming heart and marketplace of the ancient city, used for more than 700 years. Today, only a few buildings from that period have survived umong wich is the beautiful Temple of Hephaestus - the best-preserved classic temple in the whole of Greece. Its architecture has inspired others throughout the centuries and it's a miracle that it still stands here, right in the middle of a 5 million people metropole.

Black priests and Starbucks Coffee

The Ancient Agora also lies right next to our hostel's neighbourhood (the Plaka District). On our way to it, we decided to extend our breakfast with a purchase somewhere else and wounded up in a more modern part of central Athens: the Monesteraki quarter. This is a commercial area with shops, famous warehouses, shopping centres and office buildings. As anywhere else in Athens, there were also a lot of Byzantine churches. This makes a big contrast with all the modern stuff surrounding them. We saw Greek Orthodox priests wandering the streets in their typical black outfits, covering them up from top to bottom. You've got to admire them for it when the temperature has already climbed to a violent 32 degrees. We also abandoned our aim of eating/drinking only local specialities by ordering two Iced Frappucinos at the local Starbucks. The place was air conditioned, so don't blame us for it.

Back into time: The Ancient Agora

After these welcome refreshments, we went back into time. The Ancient Agora is enormous, and even though we were not the only tourists there at the time, it's a very quiet place. A weird thing to see is that the Athens metro goes above the ground right next to it, cusing you to see trains passing by right next to ancient temples and ruins. It's where modern day Athens meets its past. A very rich past - so turned out. The Agora was once a marketplace, and was inhabited by local tribes more than 7000 years ago. It has served throughout the centuries as a marketplace, government seat, batteground on multiple occasions, and finally abandoned when the Romans who occupied Greese from 100 B.C. decided to built a new Agora, somewhere else. After the Roman period, te Byzantine period began and this meant a lot of churches were built here. Also, some of the pagan temples were converted into churches. One 1000 year old church still stands here, and is defenitely worth a visit.

Another interesting building in the Agora is the Stoa of Attalos. It's a very tall building, and over 1900 years old. Today, it houses an interesting (air conditioned) museum, wich is a welcome place when the outside temperatures have gone beyond 'nicely warm'. There is a permanent exhibition displaying artefacts that were recovered from the Agora, including ancient pottery, statues (and remains of it), weaponry, masks, toys, tender and jewelry. It is all divided into diffirent periods in Greek history, from the late prehistorics up until Byzantine and Ottoman (Turkish) rule times. I noticed that you could recognize a lot of items by not looking what they resembled by reading the explaining text. This shows how well developped the ancient Greeks were, serving as a base for western civilization.

My conclusion concerning the Agora is that it's really worth going there for anyone visiting Athens. It is not boring, not expensive and a great lesson in Greek history. We all know a couple of legends from the ancient Greek mythology (the minotaur, Odysseus, Medusa) - this is the place where you can fit it all together, and see how it really was like. Just like as with the Acropolis, it's better to visit the Agora first thing in the morning, or right before sunset. It is situated inside a valley and there are hardly any cooling winds.

Robin and Alison

We have also welcomed Robin and Alison yesterday night. They arrived a little later than expected, due to the fact that Alison's flight from Dublin came in delayed and Robin's cellphone doesn't want to work here in Greece for some silly reason. Today we will head out to port in order to find the boat we will be sleeping on for the next 7 days. So it's goodbye Athens, hello Aegean Islands from now on. I don't know if we will be able to find a place with WiFi soon, so updates could come a little later.

To be continued