The Ancient Agora and Thiseio: the classical city's living room
The best-preserved Greek temple standing, a rebuilt marble stoa, and the promenade that frames it all. This is a Claude-drafted route awaiting the editor's walk.

1. Agora entrance on Adrianou
Start at the northern gate off Adrianou, the café-lined street where the old railway runs. Buy the combined ticket or the Agora-only one here. The site opens out below you — read it as a field of foundations before you walk down into it.

2. Stoa of Attalos
The long two-storey marble colonnade, rebuilt from the ground up in the 1950s by the American excavators — the one building here you can walk through as it was. The museum inside holds the small things: voting tokens, a child's potty, an ostracon scratched with a name to be exiled.

3. The Agora floor
Walk the open ground that was the marketplace, courtroom and parliament of classical Athens — where Socrates argued and was condemned. It reads as low foundations and gravel paths now; the audio or a plan helps. Take the central path slowly.

4. Temple of Hephaestus
The reason to come early. The best-preserved ancient Greek temple anywhere, standing nearly whole on the low hill of Kolonos Agoraios — Doric, complete-roofed, ringed by columns. Circle it; the view back across the Agora to the Acropolis is the one you'll keep.

5. Apostolou Pavlou promenade
Leave by the Thiseio gate onto the wide pedestrian boulevard that rings the archaeological sites — no cars, the Acropolis on one side the whole way. Café tables, street musicians at dusk, and the best long approach to the rock. This is where Athenians take their *volta* (evening stroll).

6. Thiseio rail bridge and station
End at the little 19th-century station, where the old Athens–Piraeus line crosses on a bridge with a clear sightline up to the Acropolis — a favourite framing for a reason. Trains on Line 1 run from here; a drink at one of the cafés below the bridge first, if the light's good.

The Ancient Agora and Thiseio: the classical city's living room