Plaka Walk 2023: Temple of Olympian Zeus to the Roman Agora

This walk starts at a temple that took longer to finish than most civilizations last: the Temple of Olympian Zeus. Construction began in the 6th century BC, was abandoned, restarted, and abandoned again over the centuries, until the Roman emperor Hadrian finally completed it in 132 AD — 638 years after the first stone was laid. It briefly held the title of the largest temple in Greece, with 104 towering columns. That glory lasted barely more than a century: a Germanic raid in 267 AD left it in ruins, and it was never rebuilt.

From there the walk enters Plaka itself, the oldest continuously inhabited neighborhood in Athens, its narrow lanes sitting directly on top of the ancient city. The restaurant quarter threaded through this walk has been serving people in more or less the same spot for centuries, even if the menus have changed.

The walk's other major stop is the Roman Agora, home to the Tower of the Winds — an octagonal marble tower completed by around 50 BC that functioned as the ancient world's first meteorological station and the only surviving clock tower from classical antiquity. Under Ottoman rule, whirling dervishes used it as a place of worship, a detail that's often credited with being exactly why Lord Elgin left it standing when he was busy removing marble from the Acropolis.

This is what TravelHubCam is here to show you: a walk filmed on Clean Monday 2023, moving through a temple that outlasted the empire that finished it, a neighborhood old enough to sit on top of its own history, and a 2,000-year-old tower that used to tell the weather.