Athens surroundings tour

Marathon Tumulus – Vavrona – Cape Sounio

You start the tour heading north of Athens passing some of Athens’s most beautiful and expensive suburbs (Kifisia, Ekali, Drosia). We will make a short stop at the dam of Marathon’s Lake, the main water source for the city of Athens. Then we’ll approach the plain of Marathon where the historical battle between the Athenians and the Persians took place in 490 B.C. Here we’ll visit first the starting point of the Olympic Marathon race, an event which started with the first modern Olympics in Athens in 1896. The race was inspired by the fabled run of an Athenian soldier named Pheidippides who took the message of the great victory from the Battlefield of Marathon to Athens. Its time to visit the “Tymvos”, the tomb which was raised in the burial ground in honor of the Athenian soldiers who fell in the battle against the Persians. As an ultimate honor and recognition of their bravery the dead of the Marathon Battle were the only ones ever to be buried where they died instead of in the main cemetery of Athens in Kerameikos.

We’ll complete our tour in the plain of Marathon with a visit to the Museum of Marathon. After our visit we will drive south through several towns and summer resorts and we’ll stop again at the temple of Artemis in Vravrona, sometimes called “The Parthenon of the Bear Maidens”. Skipped by most visitors – and most tour operators – solely because it is a bit out of the way this temple is rarely crowded and stands by a delightful Museum filled with images of the children who once studied at the temple of Artemis called “little bears” or Arktoi. The out-of-the-way location has protected the natural environment of this temple. The view from its grounds is uninterrupted by anything modern, even the museum is discreetly hidden behind a small hill.

Time for lunch and there is no better place to have one than in the furthest southern peak of Attica “Cape Sounio” in front of the deep blue water of the Aegean Sea. Here we’ll visit the Temple of Poseidon the most visited site outside Athens built in 440 B.C. by Pericles. Returning back to Athens via the scenic coastal road will be the most picturesque part of the whole tour.