The Excavation Beneath the Museum
Fourth century BC to twelfth century AD
Before you even enter the building you are walking over the ancient city. Beneath the glass panels of the forecourt and the floor of the entrance hall lies an entire neighbourhood of Athens, uncovered when the foundations for the museum were dug in the late 1990s. The whole museum was redesigned to stand on tall concrete pillars above it, and since 2019 a walkway leads visitors down among the streets, houses, workshops, wells and bathhouses that lay at the foot of the Acropolis from the fourth century BC until the twelfth century AD.
What you see is not a single moment but layer upon layer of ordinary life. Narrow streets follow the same lines for a thousand years. Modest houses of the Classical period are rebuilt as larger Roman ones with peristyle courtyards and private baths, and mosaic floors survive in several rooms. Look for the round cisterns and wells cut into the rock, the drains running beneath the streets, the remains of workshops and the traces of the water-supply system. One late Roman house with a colonnaded courtyard is large enough to have belonged to a wealthy family that lived here when the philosophers still taught in the city.
More than a thousand objects found in the dig, from lamps and cooking pots to children's toys and small shrines, are shown in a gallery at the level of the excavation, so that the finds stay next to the place they came from. The site can be visited without a museum ticket, but the best way to see it is from above, through the glass floor of the Gallery of the Slopes, before going down. It changes the meaning of everything upstairs: the temples on the rock were never isolated monuments but the crown of a crowded, living city.
Did You Know? The building stands on more than a hundred concrete pillars so that the ancient neighbourhood below could stay in place.
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