Piraeus

The port is not one place

The coastal-shipping quays run for several kilometres round the harbour, and the gate you need depends entirely on where you are going — the Saronic islands, the Cyclades, Crete and the Dodecanese all sail from different stretches. Walking from one end to the other with luggage takes far longer than the metro ride from Athens. The port authority publishes gates and destinations, along with arrivals and departures, on its coastal terminals pages, and runs a call centre on 14541.

Get the gate before you leave Athens

Piraeus has been handling ships since Themistocles moved the Athenian fleet here in 493 BC, and the working port grew into a sprawl of quays, so the gate number matters. Your ticket or booking confirmation should name it. If it does not, check the operator's site or the port authority's gates-and-destinations page the night before you sail.

Do not leave this to the morning. There is a free shuttle bus around the quays, but it is not fast, and at peak departure times the traffic inside the port is worse than the traffic outside it. If you are coming from the centre, the metro will drop you at the harbour end, which saves a slow taxi crawl along the coast road.

Arrive knowing your gate and you will skip most of the confusion.

Timing

Foot passengers should be at the gate an hour before departure for a large ferry and thirty minutes for a fast craft. Boarding closes well before the sailing time, and the crew will not hold a boat for a passenger stuck in queue traffic. Add the walk from the metro to the gate, which can take twenty-five minutes on foot at the far end of the harbour, and more if you are dragging luggage.

A single metro ticket costs €1.20 and covers 90 minutes of travel, so one ticket gets you from the centre to the port. For day trips, work backwards from the boarding time, not the departure time, and leave a margin for the shuttle bus or a wrong turn among the fences and gate barriers.

Strikes

Ferry strikes are called by the seamen's federation independently of the general strikes that stop the metro, so a running train tells you nothing about your boat. Greek law, under 1264/1982, requires unions to give at least 24 hours' notice, and four days where a public utility or public service is involved, but in practice announcements often reach passengers only a day or two ahead. There is no official English calendar. How Athens strikes are announced explains where they appear and what to do about a booked day trip.

Two practical points from that page: apergia.gr lists stoppages in Greek, and Hellenic Heritage tickets are non-refundable, though you can change a slot twice up to two hours before it if a strike wrecks your plan. Since a strike can cost you a whole day in port, it helps to know which athens tours and athens guided tours can be moved to another slot, which tours in Athens make clear before you commit to one.

The Archaeological Museum of Piraeus

Piraeus was the naval base that carried the Athenian fleet after Themistocles moved it here in 493 BC, and this small state-run museum holds the evidence. The great bronzes dredged out of the harbour stand here, the Piraeus Apollo among them, found in a drain in 1959, alongside grave sculpture and the remains of the ancient naval installations. It sits ten minutes from the main quay and is almost always empty, which makes a change from the scrum at the central museums.

There is no café crowd and no queue, so you can look at the bronzes properly. Opening times are not stated here, so check before you build an afternoon around it, particularly in winter when the smaller state sites keep short hours.

Mikrolimano and Zea

Two small round harbours sit on the far side of the peninsula, full of yachts and lined with fish tavernas. Mikrolimano is where Athenians go to eat fish on a Sunday, and it looks nothing like the container port on the other side of the hill. Boats have used these waters since antiquity, when the Long Walls tied the harbour to Athens so the city could not be starved out by land.

Zea was the ancient naval harbour and still has the traces of the ship-sheds where the war vessels were kept, with some foundations visible around the shore. Walk between the two harbours along the waterfront in about half an hour, then eat at whichever one has the tables you like the look of.

The ancient walls

Piraeus was laid out on a grid by Hippodamus of Miletus in the fifth century BC, one of the earliest planned towns in the Greek world, and fortified into the naval base that made the Athenian empire possible. The Long Walls built under Cimon and Pericles ran down from Athens itself, so the port could be supplied even when an army sat outside the land gates. Stretches of the ancient walls and the ship-shed foundations survive around Zea, unmarked and unfenced, so you walk past them without a ticket booth or a rope telling you so.

That is the pleasure of it, and also the problem. There is little signage, so read up before you go or you will see only rocks.

Whether to bother

On a three-day trip, no. The centre has more than enough to fill it. On a longer stay, or on a day when the small state sites shut early, an afternoon here earns its keep.

From 1 November the Olympieion, Roman Agora, Kerameikos and Aristotle's Lyceum all close at 15:00, and an afternoon that starts after lunch leaves the centre thin on options. Take the metro out, see the bronzes at the Archaeological Museum on the way, then eat fish at Mikrolimano and come back. A single ticket costs €1.20 and covers 90 minutes, so the transport is the cheapest part of the day.

The fish is not, but it is still a good use of an afternoon.