Mycenae, Epidaurus & Nafplio Private Day Tour from Athens

Overview

A private tour for your group only, real stops at ancient Mycenae, the genuine Epidaurus theatre, and Nafplio.

This is a private tour for your group only. Real stops include ancient Mycenae — home of the Lion Gate — the genuine Epidaurus theatre, and the seaside town of Nafplio.

Highlights

• The Real Lion Gate at Mycenae Genuine Bronze Age citadel entrance.
• The Real Epidaurus Theatre Genuine ancient acoustics, still in use.
• Private, Full Day 9-10 hours, just your group.

What Stops Does This Tour Make?

A popular starting point — every Voyzo itinerary is fully customizable, so we'll shape the order and stops around your group.

Important Information

Frequently Asked Questions

About This Tour

A private tour for your group only, real stops at ancient Mycenae, the genuine Epidaurus theatre, and Nafplio. This is a private tour for your group only. Real stops include ancient Mycenae — home of the Lion Gate — the genuine Epidaurus theatre, and the seaside town of Nafplio.

Mycenae was the dominant power in Bronze Age Greece from roughly 1600 to 1100 BCE, and its real Lion Gate — two confronted lionesses carved above a massive stone lintel, built around 1250 BCE — is still the main entrance into the citadel, framed by Cyclopean walls so large that later Greeks believed only mythical one-eyed giants could have built them. When the German excavator Heinrich Schliemann opened the royal shaft graves here in 1876, he found several gold funerary masks and is widely quoted as having cabled that he had "gazed upon the face of Agamemnon," the legendary king of Mycenae in Homer's Iliad. That identification is almost certainly wrong, and most archaeologists today treat it as a romantic overstatement rather than fact: the mask now known as the Mask of Agamemnon has been dated to around the 16th century BCE, some 300 to 400 years before the Trojan War Homer describes, meaning whoever it belonged to lived centuries before any historical Agamemnon could have. A minority of scholars have gone further still, questioning whether Schliemann — a brilliant but famously self-promoting excavator — may have altered or even planted the find, though this remains a disputed, far-from-settled theory rather than an accepted conclusion.

Epidaurus' ancient theatre, built toward the end of the 4th century BCE by the architect Polykleitos the Younger, is widely considered the best-preserved and most acoustically perfect theatre to survive from ancient Greece. Originally built with 34 rows of seats and later expanded to around 55, it could hold an audience of roughly 14,000 — and even visitors in the very back row can reportedly hear a coin dropped or a match struck on the circular stage below, a claim still tested (and generally confirmed, within reason) by curious tour groups today. The theatre sat within the much larger Sanctuary of Asclepius, the ancient Greek god of medicine, which functioned for centuries as something close to an ancient wellness and healing center — the sick traveled here from across the Greek world to sleep in special dormitories, hoping the god would reveal a cure in their dreams. Both the theatre and the sanctuary were inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1988, and the theatre still hosts real performances each summer as part of the Athens & Epidaurus Festival.

Nafplio closes out the day with a genuinely different kind of history: this seaside town, not ancient ruins, was the first capital of the modern Greek state, serving in that role from 1829 to 1834 before Athens took over. Its Venetian-built Bourtzi fortress sits on a small islet in the harbor, and the much larger Palamidi fortress, built by the Venetians between 1711 and 1714, looms over the town from a hilltop above it — both real, physical reminders of the centuries Venice and the Ottoman Empire spent contesting this stretch of the Peloponnesian coast before Greek independence.