Free walking tours
in Greece

August in Athens brings warm evenings and a variety of outdoor cultural events. During this month, several key festivals take place across the city: This August, the city's open-air venues come alive with a stellar lineup of music and cinema, highlighting five major events.

Most visitors crowd the main hill, but the civic life of antiquity happened down below. Aristotle taught in the shaded grounds of the Lyceum, and ordinary citizens voted at the rocky Pnyx. Visiting these secondary archaeological zones in Athens gives a clearer picture of everyday ancient routines.

Stone barbecue sets excavated in Santorini show that cooking meat on skewers over open coals is a local practice dating back millennia. Today, the classic pita sandwich relies heavily on techniques brought to Greece by Anatolian refugees in the 1920s. Navigating the menus at historic spots like Kostas requires understanding exactly what sets a simple kalamaki apart from a shaved-meat gyros before stepping up to the counter in Athens.