Filopappou Hill Kite Flying: Clean Monday 2023, Athens

The hill where this Clean Monday crowd gathers has an older name: Mouseion, the Hill of the Muses, after the poet-seer Musaeus, said to have taught and been buried there back in the 6th century BC. By tradition, a pair of caves cut into its eastern slope are pointed to as the "Prison of Socrates" — where the philosopher was supposedly held before his execution, and where Plato has him talking through his final hours with his friend Crito.

The monument that gives the hill its modern name came much later. Gaius Julius Antiochus Epiphanes Philopappos was a prince of Commagene and a Roman consul who died in Athens in 116 AD; the city, and his sister Julia Balbilla, were grief-stricken enough to build him a two-story marble tomb on the summit, carved with a frieze of him riding in a consul's chariot. It's still the first thing most people notice climbing the hill, kites or no kites.

Every Clean Monday, that same summit fills with families flying kites over the Acropolis view — a much newer tradition layered onto a very old hill, the same afternoon Greece begins its fifty days of Lent.

This is what TravelHubCam is here to show you: one Clean Monday afternoon on a hill that's been a poet's grave, a philosopher's supposed cell, and a Roman prince's tomb, long before it became the city's favorite place to fly a kite.