You’ve Seen Athens’ Acropolis. Here Are Six Cooler, Calmer Sites to See Next

While tourists fixate on the Acropolis, Athens is so layered with heritage that it has an array of other fascinating yet lower-profile sites. Some highlight the city’s Islamic influence. Others showcase Greek music, curious history, Roman architecture, local cuisine, or leafy landscaping. Here are six of Athens’ lesser-known attractions.

Fethiye Mosque

Looming over Athens, the Acropolis embodies the peak of the Greek Empire, which once stretched to parts of North Africa, West Asia and Europe. On that same hillside, meanwhile, tourists can enter a splendid mosque, topped by terra-cotta domes, that reveals how Athens was conquered.

Fethiye Mosque was a church before the Ottomans converted it and turned it into an Islamic Empire that commanded Athens from the mid-1400s to the 1830s. This small, beautifully restored building operates as a museum. It owns a prominent position, alongside the Roman Forum of Athens, which is a tourist magnet.

Fethiye Mosque is, by comparison, little visited. Those who walk through its small garden and shady porch will find artifacts and signs that document its history. Excavated Ottoman-era sculptures are displayed in the former prayer hall, which is decorated by Islamic inscriptions, and has four arches that support the mosque’s largest, central dome.

Information boards next to its old mihrab – a niche that faces Mecca – explain the many functions it had after the Ottomans left Athens: a military prison, a school, a bakery warehouse and an archaeological depot. In 2017, after a restoration, the mosque opened a  museum.

Museum of Greek Folk Musical Instruments

Athens is laden with large cultural facilities, so the comparatively tiny yet deeply interesting Museum of Greek Folk Musical Instruments may get overlooked, which may be a missed opportunity

More than 1,200 traditional Greek instruments form its collection, which is housed 19th-century mansion tucked on a serene, tree-lined alley, near Athens’ busy Monastiraki Square. Highlights include its hefty daouli drums, a membrane-covered percussion instrument,  and an intricately carved wooden zournas wind instrument, similar to an oboe. These instruments were commonly played together by Greek bands called Ziyiá.

Visitors also learn, through videos, audio and text displays, how Greek instruments were intertwined with this civilization’s many gods. Greek lore had it  that Hermes, a god of travel and thieves, pioneered the lyre, a stringed instrument similar to the harp.

Varvakios Central Market

After the Acropolis, Athens’ most prominent historic site is its Ancient Agora, a vast field of archaeological remains at the foot of the citadel. In ancient Greece, an agora was an open space that, among other things, hosted large markets. Now, that same commercial hustle unfolds just 2,000 feet north of this heritage attraction in Varvakios Agora, nicknamed the “Stomach of Athens.”

Dozens of food vendors operate beneath the lofty ceilings of this spacious, attractive building from the 1880s, also called Varvakios Central Market. This is not a tourist trap, selling overpriced souvlaki and gyros. Locals are its chief clientele.

Many visit early in the morning to collect fresh ingredients for their day’s meals. By 7 each morning, vendors are already doing a robust business in fruit, vegetables, meat, spices, nuts and seafood, Varvakios is said to the largest fresh fish market in all of Greece. Tourists, meanwhile, come to appreciate an authentic sliver of daily Athenian life, and to secure Greek delights, such as feta and kasseri, a provolone-like cheese.

Agia Dynami Church

The Ottoman layer of Athens’ history contains myriad remarkable tales, including one that hides in plain sight. Agia Dynami church, perhaps this city’s most unassuming church, was built in the 1500s and today looks out of place, so tiny that it resembles an old stone shed.

It sits beneath the overhang of a modern, high-rise hotel on Mitropoleos Street, a busy thoroughfare popular with tourists and lined by restaurants, bars and boutiques. There are several good reasons to pause here. The contrasts of its odd location make Agia Dynami photogenic. Sublime murals, most of which depict female saints, embellish the dimly illuminated hall. And it was once a secret pathway to a concealed cache of weapons.

In the 1820s, when the Greeks were fighting for independence from the Ottomans, they used to sneak guns through the city center using a network of subterranean passages. This church was a key entry to those tunnels and thus it played an unheralded role in Athens finally ending the Ottoman occupation.

Hadrian’s Arch

Vasilissis Amalias Avenue  is an eight-lane road that runs directly east of the Acropolis. Looming above its heavy traffic is a triumphant marvel, unmoved for 2,100 years. Hadrian’s Arch was built here both as a monument to Roman Emperor Hadrian and as a gateway to the Temple of Zeus.

The temple has been reduced to a few scattered ruins in a field, but Hadrian’s Arch, its tall marble arch crested by Corinthian columns is better preserved. An ancient inscription carved into the arch reads, “This is the city of Hadrian and not of Theseus,” a hero in Greek mythology.

Athens was part of the Roman Empire during Hadrian’s reign. He was an admirer of Athens and of Greek arts, and he became widely popular with Athenians because he invested heavily in their city and offered Greeks a say in how they were governed from Rome.

National Garden

Athens’ historic center lacks shade and greenery, and visitors often roast, particularly June to August, peak tourist season, when temperatures settle in the 90- to 100-Fahrenheit range. That definitely heightens the appeal of the picturesque National Garden.

Here, in the Acropolis’ eastern shadow, tourists can rest and recuperate from their ascent and descent of that hilltop wonder. Shelter is ample, thanks to the dense canopies created by the National Garden’s thousands of trees.

Athens being Athens, the garden contains ancient monuments and archaeological remains. Yet the garden’s main attraction is its cool, calm environment. Winding paths crisscross its 38 acres and curl past Queen Amalia’s Pergola, a shaded walkway dedicated to the Greek monarch who commissioned this garden in the 1830s.