The Acropolis Museum

Under the building: the excavation

Before you go up, go down. A whole block of ancient Athens — houses, workshops, drains, a bath — was excavated on the site and left in place, and the museum was built on pillars above it. It is reached from the entrance courtyard and included in the ticket, and it is the part most visitors skip because the glass floor makes it look like decoration.

It has its own opening hours, which match the museum's in summer and run 09:00 to 17:00 daily in winter.

Ground floor: the slopes

The sloping gallery reproduces the climb up to the rock. Finds from the sanctuaries and houses on the Acropolis slopes are arranged along it, the ordinary objects of people who lived under the sanctuary rather than in it. The building itself sits on the Makriyianni plot over an excavated ancient Athenian neighbourhood, which you can see through the glass floor at the entrance, and that excavation is included in your ticket.

Bernard Tschumi designed the museum with Michalis Photiadis, and it opened on 20 June 2009. Start here and the ground you walk on becomes part of the exhibition. Allow time for this floor before you climb, because the galleries above assume you have seen the everyday material first and the sequence rewards it.

First floor: the Archaic gallery and the Caryatids

The open hall of Archaic sculpture, standing free so you can walk round each figure rather than facing a wall of them — the korai with their traces of paint, the Moschophoros, the pedimental beasts. Five of the six original Caryatids from the Erechtheion stand here on a balcony, with a visible gap where the sixth should be: it was removed by Lord Elgin and is in the British Museum.

Top floor: the Parthenon gallery

A rectangular concrete core the exact dimensions of the Parthenon's cella, turned to the same compass alignment as the building itself, wrapped in the frieze at eye level and glazed on all four sides so the real temple is in view through the glass. The surviving original blocks are set beside plaster casts of the ones in London, and the difference in colour is the argument the museum is making without a word of text.

The shop, the café and the restaurant

The ground-floor shop and café need no ticket at all, so you can walk in off the street. The second-floor shop and restaurant do need one, but the desk issues a free admission ticket for that purpose, so ask rather than pay full price for a coffee. The restaurant has a terrace facing the rock and stays open until midnight on Fridays and Saturdays, which lines up with the museum's late Friday hours and gives you the lit Parthenon from above street level.

It is a separate legal entity from the state sites, with its own shop, hours and free days, so rules here do not match the Acropolis next door. Keep the restaurant ticket if you plan to come back down to the galleries afterwards.

Summer, 1 April to 31 October

Monday 09:00 to 17:00, Tuesday to Sunday 09:00 to 20:00, and Friday 09:00 to 22:00. Last entry is thirty minutes before closing and the galleries are cleared fifteen minutes before it, so a 19:45 arrival in July is not a visit but a walk through the foyer. Friday is the day to plan around, because the extra two hours in the evening carry cooler air and a lit view of the rock from the second floor and the restaurant terrace.

Full admission is €20 and the reduced €10 ticket is sold only at the desk, so reductions cannot be arranged online. During official heatwaves the ministry has closed open-air sites through the hottest hours, sometimes announced a day ahead, and the museum's air-conditioned galleries then become the sensible morning substitute.

Winter, 1 November to 31 March

Monday to Thursday 09:00 to 17:00, Friday 09:00 to 22:00, and Saturday and Sunday 09:00 to 20:00. The weekend is longer than the working week in winter, which is the opposite of what most visitors assume from the summer pattern. Friday again runs to 22:00, so a winter short break that includes a Friday can put the second-floor view of the lit rock on the itinerary without costing an evening elsewhere.

Note the contrast with the state sites in the same months, because the Olympieion, Roman Agora, Kerameikos and Aristotle's Lyceum all close at 15:00 from 1 November while this museum keeps going. Tickets are €20 full and €10 reduced, with the reduced ticket available only at the desk. Check the exact Orthodox Easter dates before you build a spring week.

Closed and short days

The museum closes on 1 January, Orthodox Easter Sunday, 1 May, and 25 and 26 December. It does not close on 25 March, which the Acropolis and other state sites do, so that national holiday is a working day here and a closed one next door. Short days are worth writing down.

Hours run 09:00 to 15:00 on 24 and 31 December, 12:00 to 18:00 on Orthodox Good Friday, and 09:00 to 15:00 on Orthodox Holy Saturday. The Orthodox dates move every year, so match them to the calendar for your trip before booking anything around them. All of the city's closures sit together on the opening-hours page, which also covers the state sites whose schedule differs from this museum on several of these dates.

Free admission days

The museum's own free days are 6 March, 25 March, 18 May and 28 October. That list does not match the state sites' calendar, and the differences catch people out. There are no free Sundays here, while the state sites open free on the first and third Sunday of each month from 1 November to 31 March, along with the last weekend of September.

On 25 March the museum is free while the Acropolis itself is closed, which makes it a useful fallback for that particular holiday. The state sites also have 6 March, 18 April, 18 May and 28 October free, so two of the museum's four dates overlap. The free-entry page puts the two calendars side by side, which is quicker than reconstructing them yourself.

The building is designed as a climb and the top floor is the reason to be here, so the short routing is not a smaller version of the long one — it is the same ending with the first two floors skipped.

The one routing worth planning a day around is Friday: the museum runs to 22:00 all year, the last two hours are the quietest good hours in Athens, and the second-floor restaurant stays open to midnight on Friday and Saturday. The hours section has every band.

How to get there

Akropoli station on Line 2 is at the door, and the museum's own directions name it as the nearest station. Lines 2 and 3 opened on 28 January 2000, and the digging turned up enough archaeology that Syntagma station keeps a free display in its concourse if you change there. On foot it is ten minutes downhill from the Acropolis south entrance along Dionysiou Areopagitou, which was pedestrianised in 2003 as part of the Unification of the Archaeological Sites programme and runs the whole way.

The nearest bus stop is Makrigianni, and trolley lines 1, 5 and 15 stop there too. There are bike racks at the main entrance and at the metro. A single ticket costs €1.20 and covers 90 minutes, which is enough from most central stops.

Groups need a booking, and it is enforced

A group is sixteen to forty people, and a reservation is mandatory. The museum warns that groups without one may not be admitted on busy days, and that even booked groups can wait, so build slack into any tight schedule. Bookings go through [email protected] or +30 210 9000903 on weekdays, so a weekend arrival with an unbooked group has no same-day route to a fix.

School groups have their own address and their own warning about arriving unbooked, which suggests the enforcement bites there too. The practical pattern is to book well ahead, carry the confirmation, and have the group leader hold the paperwork at the validation machines rather than distributing it. Individual visitors need none of this and can buy a €20 ticket at the desk.

Inside the building

Everyone passes through validation machines on the ground floor before entering the galleries, so keep tickets reachable rather than packed away. Lifts are reserved as a priority for visitors with mobility difficulties and for ticket-holders heading to the second-floor restaurant, which is one reason to take the free admission ticket the desk issues for that purpose. The museum offers a digital guide, and licensed human guides are arranged through the Tour Guide Association rather than at the door, so book a guide before you arrive if you want one.

Remember that white plaster casts stand in the Parthenon gallery where the original blocks are in London, removed by Lord Elgin in the 19th century, and the museum's own labelling makes that point plainly. The full ticket is €20, reduced €10.

- It cost €130 million, and Europe paid part of it. The construction was co-financed by the Hellenic Republic and the European Regional Development Fund. (Acropolis Museum, The Museum Building) - The top floor is a scale model you can stand in. The Parthenon Gallery measures 39 by 84 metres and is turned to the same compass alignment as the temple outside the glass, so the frieze runs around you in the order it ran around the building. (Acropolis Museum, The Museum Building) - The whole building stands on 43 columns. They were placed in collaboration with the archaeologists so the foundations would miss the ancient neighbourhood underneath, which is why the plan looks irregular from below.

There are 1,302 square metres of glass above them. (Acropolis Museum, The Museum Building) - The neighbourhood under your feet was destroyed by a Germanic tribe. The Herulians ravaged Athens in AD 267 and wrecked the site; the houses were rebuilt, acquired colonnaded courtyards and private baths, and were still occupied into the sixth century. Human activity on the plot starts somewhere between 3500 and 3000 BC.

(Acropolis Museum, the archaeological excavation) - The excavation only opened ten years after the museum did. Visitors could not walk the ancient streets until June 2019, and the small Museum of the Excavation at the southern edge was inaugurated in June 2024. (Acropolis Museum, the archaeological excavation)

There are two places to eat and they work differently. The ground-floor café and shop need no ticket at all — you can walk in off Dionysiou Areopagitou, which makes them a useful stop for anyone waiting out the middle of a hot afternoon. The second-floor restaurant does need a ticket, but the desk issues a free admission ticket for that purpose, so a meal there costs the meal and nothing else.

It has a terrace facing the rock and stays open until midnight on Friday and Saturday, which is the best view in Athens that carries no admission charge. The museum does not publish its menu prices, so we do not print a figure; for the alternative, Koukaki and Makrygianni start two minutes away and charge ordinary neighbourhood prices.