A Better Ruin Experience: The Ancient Agora

7 Sep 2023 by Amby

$13

Athens

Greece

The Ancient Agora

Sev and I got the Athens Combined ticket, which offers access to seven different ruin sites throughout the city. You can read about our time at the Acropolis here.

This article is about our time at the Ancient Agora, which we thought was overall more enjoyable than the Acropolis, although it is less well-known.

View over the Ancient Agora to the Acropolis

Arriving

We got there at 8, right when it opened. There was no line at all and we already had our ticket so got in really fast. Unlike the Acropolis, there’s no strategizing necessary for this visit.

Temple of Hephaestus

The Ruins

The Ancient Agora is a fairly big site and features many interesting attractions dating from the 5th and 4th century BC, most notably:

1) The Temple of Hephaestus, one of the best preserved in Greece.

This temple was truly amazing. It’s in (relatively) great condition and visitors can really get a sense of what these temples were supposed to look like.

Plus it’s on a hill overlooking the rest of the site, offering fantastic views and photo opportunities.

2) The restored Stoa of Attalos. The Stoa used to be a multi-story market, now it’s a museum, free with a ticket to the ruins. The museum opens at 10am though, so we missed it by arriving so early.

Seeing such a large building fully restored to its former glory was neat though, and we liked seeing the handful of statues on display outside of the museum.

3) The ruins of the Athens state prison—possibly the location where Socrates drank the hemlock.

Like a lot of ruins, there is some debate over what these might have been, but evidence suggests it was the state jail where criminals were held before sentencing. Socrates allegedly was here for a time.

I have to admit, the ruins are literally in ruins, mostly just rubble on the ground, but it’s interesting to imagine what life might have been like here 3,000 years ago.