A Neoclassical Capital: A Self-Guided Audio Tour

You can visit the museum at the end of the tour. The collections include works of the great civilizations that developed in the Aegean islands from the sixth millennium BC to 1050 BC. There is also a beautiful sculpture collection which shows the development of ancient Greek sculpture from the seventh to the fifth centuries BC including many unique masterpieces.

This is the National Library of Greece. It's home to one of the greatest collections of Greek scripts dating back to the 9th century.

This is the Greek Parliament. It was built in 1836 and for the first hundred years this neoclassical building was the king's palace.

This is called Iliou Melathron, which means the Palace of Troy. It belonged to the German archeologist Heinrich Schliemann, who had discovered the ancient city of Troy. The mansion was built in 1879 and designed by German architect Ernst Ziller. Inside the mansion is the Numismatic Museum, also known as the Coin Museum. It contains 600,000 objects. These include ancient drachmas and coins dating from the 6th century BC until the 5th century CE. There are also coins from the Roman and Byzantium eras.

This is the Academy of Athens and it's the first of three buildings designed by the Danish architect, Theophil Hansen. It was built in 1859.

The Gardens were created in 1839, as the garden of the palace. Thousands of plants were brought from all over Greece, Europe, and Africa to be planted here for the sake of the queen.

This is the heart of modern-day Athens. Everything starts from here. The word Syntagma means "constitution" in Greek. The square got its name after a popular military uprising in 1843, when Greeks gathered here demanding that the country's first King, King Otto, follow his promise and introduce the country's first constitution. Protests are still organised here. You might have seen footage of the thousands of people gathering to protest, sometimes peacefully and sometimes not. You might also have seen the molotov cocktails.