Museums in Athens: Which Ones, and When They Shut

If you are doing the Acropolis: the Acropolis Museum

The museum opened in June 2009 on the Makriyianni plot, designed by Bernard Tschumi with Michalis Photiadis. It stands over an excavated ancient Athenian neighbourhood, which you walk across on the glass floor at the entrance, and that dig is included in the ticket. The top floor is built to the Parthenon's dimensions and alignment, with the temple in the window.

White plaster casts fill the gaps where Lord Elgin's removed blocks sit in London. It is a separate legal entity from the state sites, so it keeps its own hours, its own shop and its own free days. Entry is €20 full and €10 reduced, with the reduced ticket sold only at the desk.

Allow two hours, and go after the site, not before.

If you want the famous objects: the National Archaeological Museum

The Mask of Agamemnon is the headline. Heinrich Schliemann dug it out of the shaft graves at Mycenae in 1876, one of five gold masks from Grave Circle A. It was hammered from gold leaf over a wooden form and dates to about 1525 BC, which puts it centuries before any Trojan War and before Agamemnon, if he lived. The Antikythera mechanism, the Thera frescoes and the Artemision Bronze are here too, and nowhere else.

The museum is about twenty minutes north of the ancient centre in a workaday neighbourhood, which is why it stays quieter than it deserves. Entry is €20 full and €10 reduced. Note that it opens at 13:00 on Tuesdays all year, so plan your morning elsewhere.

If you have an afternoon in Kolonaki: Cycladic, Byzantine, Benaki

Three small museums sit within eight minutes of each other on Vasilissis Sofias, and two of them shut on Tuesdays, so check before you build a day around them. The Museum of Cycladic Art opened in January 1986 around the Goulandris collection, and its marble figurines are the standout. The Byzantine and Christian Museum was founded in 1914 and moved in 1930 into Villa Ilissia, an 1848 house built as the winter residence of the Duchess of Plaisance.

It has the better building and garden. The Benaki Museum of Greek Culture was endowed by Antonis Benakis in 1930 in memory of his father Emmanuel, and the family gave their own mansion with it, holding more than 37,000 objects. It has the widest sweep.

If it is winter

From 1 November the Olympieion, the Roman Agora, Kerameikos and Aristotle's Lyceum all close at 15:00, while the Acropolis runs to 17:00. That makes museums your afternoon. The Acropolis Museum on a Friday runs to 22:00 and the National Archaeological Museum on a Tuesday to 20:00, and those two evenings are the longest indoor hours in the city.

Two warnings. First, from 1 November to 31 March the first and third Sunday of each month is a free state-site day, so expect crowds at the big sites on those mornings. Second, museums and sites close entirely on 1 January, Orthodox Easter Sunday, 25 and 26 December, and the state sites also on 1 May and 25 March.

Work the late evenings into your plan and the short days stop hurting. Once the museum evenings are locked in, tours in Athens are the natural way to fill the shorter daylight hours these closing times leave behind.