Perianth Hotel

There’s nothing like the sound of someone calling your name in an unfamiliar place. On a spring Saturday night in Athens, I emerge from Monastiraki metro station after a delayed flight and am thrust into a city so bustling it makes Barcelona look like a retirement village. I drag my suitcase over cobbles and around the ankles of the city’s many oblivious revellers in search of my hotel. 

As I duck out of a thronging square and up a quieter street, a cheerful man stands up and says my name – a sign of the attentive kindness that I soon realise is standard at the Perianth. 

The cool, grey lobby has a calm grandeur and a soothing water feature, and the staff are keen to offer recommendations for my stay. But having already missed a few hours of my evening – and with only one full day in the city before moving on – I know where I’m headed, and bolt upstairs to drop my bags before heading out to join the throng.

It’s a slight wrench to run out on my room so fast. I pop out on my floor and see intriguing artworks – a blue double-headed figure that seems to riff on Greek mythology, a giant Basquiat-style canvas that echoes the melee outside – and room numbers cast in brutalist concrete, then enter a room that’s at least half the size of my flat. 

It’s chic and minimal, with dove-grey walls: there’s a huge bed (with what I later discover are, to me, perfect pillows) and a desk with a Bluetooth speaker. Open the balcony doors and the sound of the street floods up; look to the left and there’s the Acropolis, lit as dusk falls. The room is effectively divided by a raised oak wardrobe; on the other side is a luxurious bathroom with a huge cubicle and rainfall shower head.

But escape I do, headed for Ouzeri Lesvos in the anarchist quarter for what my friend described as ‘exceptional seafood with really good signage’. The signage is beautiful – hand-painted crustaceans and fish. 

Outside, people are eating what looks like spectacular seafood – a sundial of sardines, skeletons picked bare, bread to mop up garlicky anchovy oil. But I am too late: at 9pm, I’ve just missed last service, the owner shrugs. 

Onwards, then, to Avli, for more traditional fare accessed through what feels like a secret archway: whitewashed walls, scraggly cats acting like they own the place. 

There are students smoking and families at ease; folk music on the speakers and paper tablecloths smoothed out and scrunched up: it’s whatever you need it to be, and I need Greek salad, hot fries, omelette (with more chips inside) and courgette fritters straight from the fryer.

I walk off my hearty dinner by ambling up to the Acropolis in the dark. You can’t get in among the ruins at night, but it’s worth the walk for the spectacular lighting, giving a taste of what I’ll explore tomorrow morning. Travelling alone, I feel at ease walking up the hill late at night – there are still plenty of people around. As I make it back to bed around midnight, I get the sense that the city is only just getting started, and I’m thankful that I’ve brought my earplugs: it really is a riot outside.

Sunday, then, is my one full day to see as much as possible before taking the boat to an island tomorrow. I set the alarm and start my day in the Perianth’s opulent yet understated breakfast room, the only person up at 7am. (The hotel seems quiet, which may explain why all the staff seem to know who I am.) 

I’d love to dig into the full made-to-order menu – the kagiana, scrambled eggs with tomato sauce, basil and bruschetta with feta; porridge with local tahini – but I have a big eating agenda for the day and need to start simple: Greek yoghurt as thick and sharply defined as the Alps I flew over to get here, daubed with tahini; orange-scented rice pudding, a sweet pastry, a slice of spinach and feta pie… OK, relatively simple.

It sets me up for what turns out to be a 30,000-step day. I walk to the Acropolis and feel pleasingly insignificant among these ancient ruins, then down to trendy Neos Cosmos for a wander; back to the national gardens, where I realise that it’s the orange trees in blossom that make the city smell so good I find myself gulping it down. 

I hike up the steps of the original Olympic stadium, then make it back to Ouzeri Lesvos for fried red mullet and marinated sardines so fresh they might as well have slapped me in the face with their fins. (I’m probably embarrassingly early by Greek dining standards – evidently a tourist – but who cares.) 

From there, I stomp up Lycabettus Hill, the highest point in Athens at 277 metres above sea level, then permit myself to take a break from my self-inflicted hiking schedule by reading at a hillside café with an otherworldly view, from which I can trace just how far I’ve already walked.

I manage the whole day without having to take public transport. I wander down through chic Kolonaki (though everything that isn’t a bar or restaurant is shut, being Sunday) and make a beeline for Kokkion ice cream and get a tub of mascarpone cheese with bergamot and grape molasses and gianduja hazelnut. 

As I eat the sweet creamy relief, I feel like my muscles could do with a similar favour, and email the hotel to see if there are any massage appointments: they write back immediately, I am in luck. 

First, though, a trip to the Acropolis museum to see in person the marble works at stake in the current restitution conversation between Greece and the British Museum, among other foreign institutions. The storytelling and fine detail in the frescos is staggering – as is the idea that Britain has any legitimate claim over these parts of another country’s national identity.

Back at my hotel, Violet the masseuse comes to my room and kneads the day out of me. When she asks how old I am, she responds: ‘Life is for you!’ Then she finds the knots in my back and says, with grave humour, ‘but you have problems’. (Problems she then proceeds to eradicate.) 

It’s just one more way that I come to feel known by the hotel’s kind staff, my back apparently as much a map of my identity as the path from Greek’s past to present that I’ve walked today.