Plaka is the oldest continuously inhabited quarter of Athens, wrapped around the northern and eastern slopes of the Acropolis — a labyrinth of neoclassical houses, Byzantine churches and ancient streets. Two of its lanes, Adrianou and Tripodon, can be traced back to antiquity itself. You don't tour Plaka so much as drift through it, catching the Parthenon between rooftops.
Three thousand years, and still the same address.
The quarter rewards the slow walker. Take Tripodon to its end and you meet the Choragic Monument of Lysicrates, a 4th-century BCE monument honouring a patron of the theatre — one of the rare survivors of its kind, standing quietly where it has always stood. Climb higher and the lanes narrow into Anafiotika: a tiny Cycladic village folded into the Acropolis slope, built in the 1840s by stonemasons brought from the island of Anafi, who raised their new homes in island whitewash. Roughly forty houses, still privately lived in, on paths too narrow for cars.
Go early, before the day fills, or at dusk when the marble keeps the day's last warmth. And however central you stay, reach Plaka on foot if you can — the approach through the city, with the rock and its temple overhead, is half the point.