Mycenae

When the Spartan King Menelaus came to Mycenae in the Heroic Age, seething with anger at the loss of his wife to Troy, his brother, Agamemnon, launched ten thousand ships in his name. What ensued is now known to us as the Trojan War, and stands as a testimony to the formidable power that this city state set betwixt the shrub-clad limestone hills of the Argolid once held.

Today, just a shadow of the great citadel remains, eerily ringed by burial chambers and gloomy beehive tombs; their Kterismata (objects buried alongside the dead) unearthed from these grave sites are now exhibited in the National Archaeological Museum of Athens. Glimpses of the centre’s former glory do linger though; high overhead in the chiselled effigies of the Lion Gate, in all the striking cyclopean bulwarks (thought to have been constructed with the help of one-eyed giants), and even underground, where the cisterns show just how advanced this hegemon of pre-Ancient Greece had become by the time it fell to the raiding Sea Peoples of the Mediterranean. Mycenae tour guides advice making early morning trips out of Athens to escape the direct rays of the sun, as they help unravel the historic wonders of this site atop a rocky hill.