The National Archaeological Museum opened in 1866 to house Greece's 19th-century excavation finds, and it hasn't stopped growing since. Architects Ludwig Lange and Panagi Kalkos designed this neoclassical building for what would become the country's largest archaeological collection. More than 11,000 artefacts now fill its galleries, spanning six millennia of Greek civilisation.

The holdings are remarkably diverse. You'll find pottery dating from 5000 BC, sculpture from the 7th to 5th centuries BC, and treasures from Aegean island civilisations that flourished between 6000 and 1050 BC. The Egyptian and Near Eastern antiquities collection is the only one of its kind in Greece. Then there's the Antikythera shipwreck collection, centred on a 1st-century BC scientific instrument used for astronomical and calendrical calculations, an ancient computer that predates anything comparable by more than a millennium.

VoiceMap's self-guided audio tours use the museum as a finale, tracing the origins of sculptures seen elsewhere in Athens and explaining how fragments scattered across the city connect to the comprehensive collections housed here.