Acropolis Museum Entry Ticket — Athens, Summer 2026

Opened in 2009 at the foot of the sacred rock, the Acropolis Museum was built to hold, in one place and in natural light, the sculpture of the Athenian Acropolis — and to make the case, quietly but unmistakably, for the return of the Parthenon Marbles held in London. Bernard Tschumi's glass-and-concrete building is a piece of the argument: excavated ruins of an ancient Athenian neighbourhood lie under a glass floor at the entrance, and the whole structure is rotated to align its top gallery with the Parthenon on the hill above.

What to see

The climax is the top-floor Parthenon Gallery, a full-size glass hall where the temple's frieze, metopes and pediment sculptures are mounted at their original spacing and orientation, with the Parthenon itself framed through the windows; white plaster casts stand in for the pieces still in the British Museum, a deliberate and pointed contrast. Lower floors move chronologically: the Archaic Gallery is a forest of free-standing kore and kouros statues that you can circle completely, many keeping traces of their original paint, and the Caryatids of the Erechtheion stand on a balcony where you can study five of the six originals up close. The ground-floor Gallery of the Slopes follows the finds from the settlement excavated beneath your feet.

Know before you go

Allow one and a half to two hours. It pairs naturally with the Acropolis archaeological site, which is a separate ticket — do the hilltop early or late to dodge the heat, and the museum in between. A timed online ticket is worth it in summer. Photography is allowed on most floors but not in the Parthenon Gallery. The second-floor restaurant has an open terrace with a direct Parthenon view and is open to non-ticket holders.