What to Do in Athens Before Your Charter

In our Guest Editors series, we invite people who know a place — or a craft — better than anyone to write about it in their own words. Here, Vanessa Kyriazi of Locally Yours on how to give Athens two days before you board.

Most people meet Athens for about 40 minutes. The drive in from the airport, luggage in the boot, the city sliding past the window on the way to the marina. The boat is ready, the islands are waiting, and who wants to sit in Attica traffic when the Cyclades are a day's sail away?

Stay two days and the city earns you. Athens in high summer is hot and the midday traffic is real, so keep your city hours for the mornings and the evenings and let the hot afternoons belong to the water. Almost everything below sits within 30 minutes of the marinas along the Athenian Riviera, which means you can give the city its due and still board rested.

Start with the stone the city is made of. In a working sculpture studio you can spend a morning with a chisel and a block of Pentelic marble, the same white stone quarried for the Parthenon, guided by a sculptor who learned the craft from his father and his father before him.

It is slower and harder than you expect, and the small carved thing you carry out is nothing a museum would want. It is also the most direct way to understand this place. You feel why the ancient sculptors are still spoken of, because you have just spent two hours failing to do what they did.

With the right arrangements, you can visit the Acropolis outside public hours, before the site opens or after it closes, without the day's crowds on the steps. You climb with a guide in low morning or evening light, with room to stand, look at the Parthenon up close, and take in the view over the city.

Athens has a serious contemporary art scene, and the good part of it happens behind doors you would walk straight past. A private studio visit puts you in the room with the artist, the half-finished canvases, the coffee, the argument they are having with the work. You can buy something or buy nothing. Either way you leave having actually talked to the person who made it, which almost never happens in a gallery.

If you would rather look than talk, private gallery visits open the spaces in Kolonaki and the old industrial blocks of Metaxourgeio and Psyrri, with someone who can tell you what you are looking at. The right advisor already knows which studios and galleries are worth your afternoon, and can open them outside public hours, which matters in August when half the city keeps its own schedule.

Greek wine is having a good decade and most visitors never get near the interesting bottles. A tasting led by a working winemaker walks you through the indigenous grapes, the mineral Assyrtiko, the old-vine Savatiano that Attica has grown for centuries, the deep Agiorgitiko from further south, and explains how the soil and the heat end up in the glass. For a longer afternoon, the vineyards of Attica are a short drive from the coast and happy to receive you among the vines.

Do the same with olive oil while you are here. Tasted properly, from a warmed glass, a good Greek oil has as much to say as wine: grass, pepper, a bitterness at the back of the throat that tells you it is fresh. An hour with someone whose family has pressed oil for four generations changes how you shop for it forever.

A well-known Athenian chef opens their own apartment for the evening, the city spread out below the windows. You cook a few dishes together and eat what you made. The focus is Athenian home cooking: what actually goes on the table in the city, not the taverna version.

The same evening works with a food writer who knows the city's eating history, or in the kitchen of an award-winning restaurant, working next to the chef during a quiet service.

You will spend the next week on deck, so give your body a good morning first. Along the South Athens coast you can walk the coastal trails or roll out a mat for sunset yoga on the Riviera, with a trainer who grew up on these beaches, the sea on one side and the light going gold over Vouliagmeni. Breathing, gentle movement, salt air. It is the right way to arrive at a holiday and the right way to shed a long flight.

Athens rewards anyone who looks twice. A walk through the hidden arcades and quiet passages with a designer who knows them shows you the typography, the doorways, the layers of a city that has been rebuilt a hundred times. Bring your phone or a camera. You will leave with a set of photographs that look nothing like the postcards, and a feel for the place that the drive from the airport never gives you.

When Athens has done its work, the marina is 20 minutes away and the crew is expecting you. You board having eaten well, slept off the flight, and met a handful of people who actually live here, which is a very different thing from stepping onto a boat straight off a plane.

The islands are the reason you came. Athens is the reason you will come back a day earlier next time. Bring these experiences, and many more, into your charter: speak to Vanessa at Locally Yours via Aris Drivas Yachting.