Fourteen days in Greece: the mainland first, and it is the better half

Start at the water. The tower at the eastern end of the seafront is Ottoman, about thirty-four metres of it, built into the city wall in the fifteenth or sixteenth century and used for so long as a prison that it was known as the tower of blood. It was whitewashed in 1890 in an attempt to shed the name, which is how it got the one it has now. Inside is a spiral ramp with a museum of the city on the way up and a terrace at the top.

Walk inland to the arch. The emperor Galerius built a palace quarter here around the year 300 and three pieces of it survive in the middle of the modern street grid. The arch went up in 303 to mark a victory over the Persians, and the surviving piers are carved from top to bottom with the campaign in horizontal bands, like a comic strip. It stands in the road and people walk their dogs past it.

Two minutes north is the brick drum that was built as part of the same complex, probably as a mausoleum. It is almost as old as the Pantheon in Rome and looks like a smaller cousin of it. It has been a temple, a church with gold mosaics that are still in the vault, and a mosque, and the minaret from the last of those still stands outside.

Then eat. Thessaloniki cooks with more spice and more Anatolian influence than the rest of Greece, and the way to do it is small plates and a long table.

The basilica of the city's patron is the largest church in Greece and the place to start. It was raised in the seventh century over the Roman baths where a young officer was killed for his faith in about 306, burned in the great fire of 1917 and rebuilt from its own foundations by 1949. What you see is honest reconstruction around genuine columns and a handful of surviving mosaic panels.

Do not miss the crypt, and most people do: the stairs are to the right of the altar. Underneath is the Roman bath structure itself, with a fountain, marble fragments and the shrine that the whole enormous church was built to cover.

Ten minutes uphill is the domed church that copies the one in Constantinople, eighth century, squat and heavy, with a ninth century mosaic of the Ascension filling the whole dome: twelve apostles standing in a ring of foliage, looking up. It survived four hundred years as a mosque.

The third is the plainest and the oldest, a fifth century basilica of brick and stone that has never been substantially rebuilt. It is a straightforward hall with columns, Ionian capitals cut when the empire was still one thing, and a scatter of original mosaic in the arches. Nothing dramatic happens in it, which is why it is worth twenty minutes.

Three hours on the train, with a change onto a branch line that runs out across the Thessalian plain. For the last twenty minutes the rock pillars are ahead of you through the window and getting steadily less believable.

Kalambaka sits directly under them. Before going up, look at the church at the top of the old town: a Byzantine cathedral, largely fourteenth century over much older foundations, with a marble pulpit standing in the middle of the nave rather than against a wall, which is an arrangement almost nothing else in Greece has kept.

Then take the road up for one monastery before dinner. The most accessible of the six is the one on the eastern side, a convent reached across a short bridge rather than up a staircase, and it is the right introduction: a small painted church, a museum of vestments and manuscripts, and a terrace looking straight down onto the town.

Get back down for sunset. The light comes across the plain from the west and hits the pillars end on for about twenty minutes.

Start early, because the coach parties arrive from about ten and the monasteries are small. If you are walking, the old monks' paths climb from the town through the rocks and get you to the first gate in about an hour, which is far better than the road.

The oldest and largest was founded in the fourteenth century by a monk who is supposed to have been carried up by an eagle, which is one explanation. The church is sixteenth century with a painted interior of martyrdoms that does not hold back, and the old kitchen, refectory and cooperage are open. There is also the windlass room, with the net and rope they used to haul up supplies and, until the 1920s, visitors.

The second largest is across a small gorge from it, reached by a bridge, and it is the better building: a church of 1542 painted by a Cretan master, a barrel-vaulted refectory now used as a museum, and a wooden tower with the winch still in it.

Finish at the small convent on its own pillar in the middle of the group, which has the most photographed position of all six because the rock it stands on is barely wider than the walls. It is reached by two bridges from the ridge behind.

Then sit somewhere and look at it. Every viewpoint on the loop road is free and most of them have nobody on them after five.

The journey across is the awkward one. With a car it is three and a half hours over the mountains and one of the best drives in the country. By bus it is a chain of connections through Trikala, Lamia and Amfissa that will take most of the day, so start at first light and do not book anything.

Delphi is a shelf on the side of Parnassus with a valley of olive trees falling away below it to the gulf. The Greeks thought it was the centre of the world and marked the spot with a stone; the sanctuary grew up around a temple where a priestess answered questions on behalf of Apollo for something like a thousand years, in verse that was famously easy to misread.

The site climbs steeply. A paved way switchbacks up past the treasuries that individual cities built to hold their offerings, one of them rebuilt from its own blocks, to the terrace of the temple with six columns re-erected. Above that is a theatre for five thousand people with the whole valley behind the stage, and above that again, a fifteen minute climb, the stadium where the Pythian games were run.

The museum by the entrance holds what came out of it, and one object justifies the whole detour: a life-size bronze charioteer from about 474 BC, complete with his reins, his eyelashes and his feet, standing where he has stood since he was dug up in 1896. Very little Greek bronze survived the scrap merchants. This did because an earthquake buried it.

Leave after breakfast. The road drops through the olives to the gulf, runs west along the shore and crosses to the Peloponnese on the suspension bridge at Rio, which is two and a half kilometres of cable-stayed roadway over water too deep to found piers in properly. Then east along the northern coast to the Argolid, about four hours in all.

Nafplio was the seat of the Greek government from 1823 and the capital of the new state until 1834, when everything moved to Athens. It looks the part: Venetian arcades, neoclassical houses with iron balconies, marble streets polished by two centuries of feet, and a small harbour with a castle on a rock in the middle of it.

Go up to the fortress in the late afternoon, when the sun is off the staircase. The Venetians built it in the early 1700s on the crag above the town, eight self-contained bastions each able to hold out if the others fell, and it fell to the Ottomans anyway within a year of completion. The stairway from the town is traditionally counted at nine hundred and ninety-nine steps and nobody agrees on the real number.

Come down at dusk. The little island fort in the harbour was built in the fifteenth century to hold a chain across the entrance, and it later housed the town's executioner, on the grounds that nobody wanted to live next door to him. Boats go out in season; from the quay at sunset it is a silhouette, which is enough.

Twenty minutes north is a fortified hilltop that was the centre of a civilisation five hundred years before classical Greece existed, and which the Greeks themselves remembered only as legend until a German businessman dug it up in 1876 and found the legend was largely true.

You go in under a gate with two lionesses carved above it, facing each other across a column, cut about 1250 BC. The lintel below them weighs something like twenty tonnes and nobody is entirely sure how it was lifted. Inside the wall is the royal grave circle where the gold masks came out of the ground, and above that the ramp to the palace, and the view over the plain of Argos that explains why anybody built here.

Outside the walls, down the road, is a beehive tomb cut into the hillside: a thirty-six metre stone passage leading to a domed chamber that was the largest unsupported span in the world for the next fifteen hundred years. It is empty, it is dark, and standing in the middle of it is the best minute of the day.

In the afternoon, drive east to the theatre. Built in the fourth century BC as part of a healing sanctuary, it holds fourteen thousand people, and it is intact: the acoustics are so exact that somebody speaking normally on the floor can be heard on the back row, and everyone tries it. Concerts are staged here every summer.

That is a full day. Eat late and badly in the best sense, at a taverna on the harbour front back in town.

Two and a half hours on the coach to the main terminal, then a bus or a taxi into the centre. Get in by lunchtime and spend the afternoon on the easy things, which in Athens means the ones you can walk between.

Start at the stadium in the hollow east of the parliament gardens. It was cut into the hillside in the fourth century BC, rebuilt in marble by a rich Athenian in the second century AD, then excavated and rebuilt in marble again for the first modern Olympic Games in 1896. It is the only stadium in the world built entirely of marble, the audio guide is included, and you can run on the track.

Walk west to the arch, a marble gateway of about 131 that marked the boundary between the old Greek city and the new quarter the emperor Hadrian was building. The inscriptions say so explicitly, one on each face: this is Athens, the city of Theseus, on the side facing the old town, and this is the city of Hadrian, not of Theseus, on the other.

Behind it stand the columns of what was, when it was finally finished, the largest temple in Greece. It was begun in the sixth century BC by a tyrant, abandoned for six and a half centuries, and completed by Hadrian in the same campaign as the arch. Fifteen of its hundred and four columns are standing and one more lies where a storm dropped it in 1852, in neat sections, like a stack of coins.

Be at the gate when it opens, which in summer is eight. The site is busiest between ten and one and there is almost no shade on top. The western entrance takes the coaches; the smaller southern gate by the museum usually moves faster.

You come up through a monumental marble gatehouse and out onto the plateau, and the first effect is not the temple but the space: a flat rock the size of a few football pitches standing clear above a city of three million, mountains on three sides and the sea on the fourth.

The great temple was built in fifteen years in the middle of the fifth century BC, from marble quarried sixteen kilometres away, and survived nearly intact as a church and then a mosque until a Venetian shell found the Ottoman powder store inside it in 1687 and blew the middle out. What is happening to it now is a slow, exact reassembly that has been running since 1975.

On the northern edge is the smaller temple with six draped women standing in for columns on its southern porch. Those are copies. Five of the originals are in the museum below and the sixth is in London, which remains the loudest unresolved argument in European museum politics.

Then go down to that museum. It stands on an excavated neighbourhood you walk across on glass floors, and its top storey is a glass gallery the exact size and orientation of the temple above it, holding the surviving sculpture in the order it was carved. Standing in it with the real thing framed in the window is the best hour in Athens.

The civic centre of the classical city lies on the low ground north-west of the rock, and it is where the interesting things actually happened: the law courts, the mint, the council house, the shops, and the covered walks where Socrates went to annoy people until they executed him for it. It is now a green archaeological park full of tortoises and takes a comfortable two hours.

The temple on the western rise is the best preserved Greek temple anywhere, and the reason is unglamorous: it spent thirteen hundred years as a church, so it kept its roof. Nobody photographs it because it is not on the skyline.

Ten minutes west is the ancient cemetery, which is the part of Athens almost nobody visits and one of the most affecting. It was the city's burial ground for a thousand years and the grave markers are still standing along the road out: horsemen, seated women, a dog, families saying goodbye to each other in carved relief. There is a small museum with the originals of the best of them.

Give the afternoon to the national collection, twenty minutes north of the centre. It is the best museum of Greek antiquity anywhere and it is arranged in order, so you can walk from Cycladic figurines through the Mycenaean gold you saw the findspot of three days ago to the classical bronzes in an hour if you are firm with yourself. The god throwing something, recovered from a shipwreck, and the corroded geared calculator recovered from another one, are both here.

Down to Piraeus on the metro and onto the ferry. In summer the fast boat crosses in about six hours in daylight; the rest of the year it is the night sailing, so check which one you have booked before you plan the day. The approach to Heraklion past the fortified islet in the bay is the best part.

Crete does not feel like the rest of Greece and it does not want to. It was Venetian for four and a half centuries, then Ottoman until 1898, and it only joined the Greek state in 1913. The accent, the food, the music and the sense of humour are all its own.

Heraklion's centre is a small grid inside enormous Venetian walls. Start at the fountain in the middle of it, finished in 1628, with eight lions holding up the bowl and Venetian carving all round the basin, standing in a square of cafes that is busy from breakfast until well after midnight.

Beside it is the Venetian merchants' club, an arcaded building of the same year that is now the town hall, and one of the best pieces of Venetian architecture outside Italy. Then walk down to the harbour, where the sea fort sits on the mole with the lion of St Mark over the gate, and have dinner on the water.

Five kilometres south of town is the palace of a civilisation that nobody knew existed until Arthur Evans started digging in 1900. It covers about twenty thousand square metres on several levels, with a central court, storerooms full of jars taller than a person, light wells, drains and a throne room with a stone chair still in it.

Be clear about what you are looking at. Evans reconstructed large parts of it in painted concrete, guessing where he had to, and the bright red columns and the frescoes on the walls are his interpretation rather than the evidence. Archaeologists have argued about it for a century. It also makes the site legible to anybody who is not an archaeologist, which no other Minoan palace is, so take the arguments with you and go anyway.

In the afternoon, the museum in town, which holds the actual finds and is the other half of the same visit. Two floors, arranged chronologically, and the Minoan galleries are among the great museum rooms of Europe: the bull-leaping fresco, the snake goddesses, the carved stone vessels, the gold bee pendant, and a clay disc stamped with a script that has never been read.

Do it in that order. The palace first gives you the plan, and the museum then puts the contents back into it.

Start on the mole. The sea fort at the end of the Venetian harbour was rebuilt in the 1520s and 1530s, twenty-six vaulted chambers on two levels with walls up to nine metres thick, and it held out against an Ottoman siege that lasted twenty-one years, which is the longest in European history. It is open, it is cool inside, and the parapet gives you the whole harbour and the island out in the bay.

Then the historical museum on the seafront, which picks up where the archaeological one stops: Byzantine Crete, the Venetian centuries, the Ottoman ones, the revolts, the German invasion of 1941 and the resistance in the mountains. It also holds the only two paintings by El Greco on the island, who was born in a village a few kilometres from here and left for Venice at twenty-six.

That is enough for the morning. Keep the afternoon for whatever you have been putting off.

The obvious uses are a beach east or west of the city on the local bus, the old Venetian town an hour along the coast with its harbour and its lighthouse, or the mountain plateau an hour inland with its windmills and its cave. Any of the three is a good last day.

Heraklion airport is on the coast four kilometres east of the centre, which is close enough that you will hear the aircraft from your hotel and near enough to leave everything until late.

Before the taxi, walk five minutes to the domed church on the main square. It was built as a Byzantine church, converted into a mosque under the Ottomans and reconsecrated after 1923, and it holds the skull of the man Paul of Tarsus left in charge of Crete, brought back from Venice in 1966 after seven centuries in exile. The interior is plain, cool and usually empty.

There are flights all over Europe from here in summer and a reduced schedule in winter, and there is also a night boat back to Piraeus if you would rather finish the way you arrived.

Whatever you do, do not book a departure before eleven. Two weeks of eight o'clock starts have earned you one morning that does not have one.