Advertisement

How I tricked my tween into loving ancient history in Athens

How can you make ancient ruins come alive? Start with the perfect child-friendly guide - samott - Fotolia
How can you make ancient ruins come alive? Start with the perfect child-friendly guide - samott - Fotolia

We’re sitting in Cafe Orea Ellas, one of the oldest in the city, and my 12-year-old daughter is brewing Greek coffee over a small stove. Careful now, just as it’s boiling over, she tips the coffee from the long-handled copper pot into the tiny cup without spilling a drop. Hey presto!

Kostas, our guide, digs into his bag of goodies to pull out the final missing piece of broken pottery.

“Now you have completed all your tasks,” he says, handing it over.

While I get to sip on the coffee, my daughter fits together all the pieces to reveal an ancient drawing of Athena, the protector goddess of Athens.

It could have been difficult visiting such an historical city with children, finding ways for them to discover and appreciate everything on offer, but that’s where Kostas and Athens Insiders come in.

Armed with his bag of tricks, Kostas takes us on a walking tour specially designed for children, skipping the more obvious, staid attractions and instead delving into some of the city’s lesser-known corners.

Lila's interest was sparked by the sartorial choices of the guards - Credit: Adharanand Finn
Lila's interest was sparked by the sartorial choices of the guards Credit: Adharanand Finn

We start at the tomb of the unknown soldier, which is permanently guarded by two motionless Evzoni sentries in traditional outfits. My daughter finds their attire absurd.

“It’s like they had a competition to see who could think up the most ridiculous clothes,” she giggles. They wear big pompoms on the ends of their shoes, red hats with long tassels, white skirts and tights.

Just like the Grenadier Guards in London, the guards in Athens maintain fixed stares and stand as still as statues. People are allowed to pose next to them to take photographs, but if you get too close the guard will stamp his foot, forcing a more ordinary guard to come over and berate you. The hourly changing of the guard is a skit straight from Monty Python’s ministry of silly walks.

From there, Kostas has us searching for a human skeleton in the nearby Metro station. Athens has so many layers of history buried under the ground that each Metro station has a mini-museum of things found on that spot during excavation.

At each stop along the tour, we have to complete a challenge to win the pieces of pottery that will later make up the picture of Athena. So in Syntagma Square, at the centre of the city, he has us drawing the fountains and buying koulouri - a circular bread topped with sesame seeds that seems to count as breakfast for most Athenians - from street vendors.

Then, in the narrow backstreets of nearby Plaka, we’re forced to undertake the arduous task of blind-tasting the local ice cream and trying to guess the flavours.

After stopping at the Museum of Education to learn how to write our names in Greek (which is a challenge for me), Kostas takes us to Anafiotika, the city’s secret neighbourhood. He says that even local people often cannot find it. It was built to resemble a small village on a Greek island, which is exactly what it looks like, with tiny passageways between the white houses and stray cats basking in the sun. We wind our way through and up to the top, where we discover a view across the city.

The 14 best Greek islands for families
The 14 best Greek islands for families

It is quite a sight, and Kostas has us plotting the landmarks on our map: from the ancient Panathenaic stadium built entirely of marble, to the venues from the 2004 Olympics out near the harbour. But it is up on the rock right behind us that we need to look to find Athens’ most famous and important landmark: the Acropolis.

The Acropolis is a series of ancient ruins perched on top of one of the highest of the seven hills that strike up out of the city sprawl. Its centerpiece is the Parthenon temple, which dates to 438 BC and is one of the world’s greatest cultural monuments - not a detail my 12-year-old would normally embrace, but our guide, Eleni, has a magic prop.

Eleni and Lila compare notes - Credit: Adharanand Finn
Eleni and Lila compare notes Credit: Adharanand Finn

At strategic points as we make our way around the ancient site, she pulls out her iPad.

Holding it up in front of the ruins, we then watch as it reconstructs them before our eyes. Designed in conjunction with the archaeological department at Athens University, this is more than a cheap gimmick, and helps us visualise how the ancient Greeks used the buildings.

My daughter has studied Greek gods at school, and she’s enthralled as we clamber around the ruins and listen to Eleni’s stories of limbs being chopped off and children being born through cracks in the heads of deities. Seeing the construction up-close is also a source of wonder: my daughter is intrigued by the way they built the pillars, by simply laying huge blocks of stone on top of each other, with only a small stick in the centre to line them up. It seems almost risky.

Up on the Acropolis, the views reach out across the city in every direction. Yet we can’t help but want to outdo ourselves, rounding off our trip with a visit to the actual highest point in Athens, Mount Lycabettus.

Finn and his daughter relax after touring Athens - Credit: Adharanand Finn
Finn and his daughter relax after touring Athens Credit: Adharanand Finn

After all our walking tours, we decide to be lazy and take the cable car, which rides up to the top inside the mountain. Here we are on top of the world, sipping Greek coffee (again) and looking down on the gleaming white metropolis - the Greek word, incidentally, for “mother city”. See how erudite we’ve become?

Adharanand Finn travelled from London with Aegean Airlines and stayed at the Hilton Hotel in Athens. For more information on Greece, visit discovergreece.com.