National Archaeological Museum, Athens (Museums)

Greece's national archaeological collection is older than the building that now houses it. It started in 1829 on the island of Aigina, established by Ioannis Kapodistrias, the country's first head of state after independence, and spent decades being shuffled between temporary locations before construction finally began on a purpose-built museum in 1866. It took 23 years — completed in 1889 — and was paid for by an unusually international mix of donors: the Greek state and Archaeological Society, land given by Eleni Tositsa, and a final infusion of money from the Vernardakis brothers, Greek benefactors living in St. Petersburg.

What the building holds now justifies the wait. Among the free-admission-day crowds in this video are the gold funerary masks Heinrich Schliemann excavated from Mycenae's royal graves in the 1870s — including the one popularly called the Mask of Agamemnon, a name almost certainly wrong (it predates the Trojan War era by several centuries) but permanent anyway. Elsewhere in the collection sits the Antikythera mechanism, a corroded bronze device pulled from a shipwreck in 1901 that turned out to be a startlingly precise astronomical calculator — built more than two thousand years before anything comparable existed again.

This is what TravelHubCam is here to show you: not a highlight reel, but the unhurried walk-through pace of a museum built by international donation money to hold objects that rewrote what people thought the ancient world was capable of.