Athens and around - The Rough Guide to Greece - page 78

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(Panepistimíou 12; Tues-Sat 8am-8pm; €3; W nma.gr) with a collection of over
600,000 coins and related artefacts.

Platía Klafthmónos
Platía Klafthmónos offers a wonderful view towards three grand Neoclassical buildings on
Panepistimíou. Here the planners' conceptualization of the capital of newly independent
Greece can for once be seen more or less as they envisaged it, blending the nation's
Classical heritage with modern, Western values. As you look up you see, from the left, the
sober grey marble of the National Library , the rather racier Akadhimía (University),
enlivened by frescoes depicting King Otto surrounded by ancient Greek gods and heroes,
and the frankly over-the-top Academy of Science with its pediment friezes and giant
statues of Athena and Apollo. The garish decoration gives an alarming impression of what
the Classical monuments might have looked like when their paintwork was intact.
Behind these buildings, on Akadhimías, is a major terminus for city buses , from where
you can get a connection to almost anywhere in the city or its suburbs.

Omónia and the bazaar
While Pláka and Sýndagma are resolutely geared to tourists and the Athenian
well-heeled, Platía Omonías (Omónia Square) and its surroundings represent a much
more gritty city. Here the grand avenues imagined by the nineteenth-century planners
have been subverted by time and the realities of Athens' status as a commercial capital.
Heading up from Monastiráki, the bazaar area around Odhós Athinás is home to a
bustling series of markets and small shops spilling into the streets and offering some of
urban Athens' most compelling sights and a cosmopolitan ethnic mix. It's also a
neighbourhood being increasingly recolonised by the drug addicts and prostitutes who
were cleared out in time for the Olympics; a process accelerated by the economic crisis.
Platía Omonías itself - brutal and shadeless - has little to offer in terms of aesthetics
but it is the heart of Athens for a good portion of the population: a continuous turmoil
of people and cars.

The Bazaar
The city's bazaar area is concentrated on Athinás and Eólou streets . Here the
unsophisticated stores still reflect their origins in the Oriental souk system with each
street specialized in selling certain goods. Hence the Monastiráki end of Athinás is
dedicated to tools; food stores are gathered around the central market in the middle,
especially along Evripídhou; there's glass to the west; paint and brasswork to the east;
and clothes in Eólou and Ayíou Márkou. Always raucous and teeming with shoppers,
kouloúri (bread-ring) sellers, gypsies and other vendors, the whole area is great free
entertainment.

The meat and seafood market
The lively heart of the neighbourhood is the central meat and seafood market ,
occupying almost an entire block bordered by Athinás, Evripídhou, Eólou and
Sofokléous. The building itself is a grand nineteenth-century relic, with fretted iron
awnings sheltering forests of carcasses and mounds of hearts, livers and ears - no place
for the squeamish. In the middle section of the hall is the fish market, with all manner
of bounty from the sea squirming and glistening on the marble slabs.

The fruit and vegetable market
Across Athinás is the colourful fruit and vegetable bazaar, surrounded by streets where
grocers pile their stalls high with sacks of pulses, salt cod, barrels of olives and wheels of