Odeon of Herodes Atticus

The Odeon of Herodes Atticus is the marble theatre at the western end of the Acropolis’s South Slope, raised by Herodes Atticus in memory of his wife Regilla between 160 and 174 AD. It has been closed since 1 July 2026 for a restoration that will last at least 3 years, with no reopening date published. Its 3-storey stage wall is still there to see from the street.

This page is the free audio guide, plus the practical detail read on 22 September 2026 from the Greek Ministry of Culture, the state ticket office and the Athens Epidaurus Festival, which runs the venue: what the closure means in dates, what the surrounding archaeological site costs, what time it shuts tonight, and where to stand to see the monument.

What the audio guide tells you

It is free, it plays in your phone’s browser, and there is no app to install and no sign-up. Press play on the pedestrian street of Dionysiou Areopagitou, in front of the facade, and carry it with you into the South Slope site. These are the stops:

Closed since 1 July 2026, for at least 3 years

The single fact that governs a visit today: the Odeon of Herodes Atticus is shut. The Greek Ministry of Culture has taken it out of service for a full restoration, and the Minister of Culture, Lina Mendoni, put the length of it in writing in the Ministry’s announcement of 23 February 2026: the conservation, restoration and upgrade works “will last at least 3 years from the time they begin, during which the monument will remain closed”.

Read that sentence closely, because it is precise in one direction and open in the other. It fixes a minimum of 3 years. It does not fix a start date, and it gives no reopening date at all. As of 22 September 2026 the Ministry has published none, and neither has the Festival that used the building. Anyone planning a trip around a performance here should treat the building as unavailable and nothing more precise than that.

What can be dated exactly is the closing. The venue’s own programme ran its last night on 30 June 2026, and from 1 July 2026 there has been nothing on it. The Festival’s call for its 2027 programme, published on 5 August 2026, states that the Odeon “remains unavailable due to ongoing restoration works” and lists the 3 venues that will carry the season instead: the Ancient Theatre of Epidaurus, the Little Theatre of Ancient Epidaurus and Peiraios 260. So the second summer of the closure is already settled too. The Greek National Opera has moved its summer productions to Epidaurus for the same reason.

The last night: John Legend, on 30 June 2026

The 2026 season at the Odeon lasted 28 days. There were 18 performances, all at 21:00, between 3 and 30 June 2026 — and nothing before or after in the whole year. The Festival did not treat that month as an ordinary programme. It called it the Farewell Celebrations, and on 6 April 2026 its artistic director, Michail Marmarinos, wrote that the Odeon, “before it is sealed and retreats into silence for a few years”, would open “for only one month — this special June — its gates”.

The month opened on 3 June with Víkingur Ólafsson making his Greek debut with a Bach, Beethoven and Schubert programme, an evening the Festival’s press kit lists under the heading opening ceremony. It closed on Tuesday 30 June 2026 with John Legend, Evening of Songs & Stories, listed under the heading closing ceremony and described there as the last cultural event to take place on the theatre’s stage before its closure and the start of the restoration works. The night before, on 29 June, the Athens State Orchestra under Michał Nesterowicz had played Mahler’s Eighth.

What the restoration will actually do

The Ministry’s announcement is unusually detailed about the condition of the building, and it explains why 3 years is a floor rather than a ceiling. The monument shows structural problems: decay concentrated in the upper arcade of the facade, loss of mass and cracking in the stone blocks, small deformations and localised areas in danger of collapse. There is biocorrosion where micro-organisms grow in hollows that hold standing water, root systems working into the joints, and failure of earlier interventions. The interdisciplinary studies were commissioned from the National Technical University of Athens in July 2025 by the Ministry’s Directorate for the Restoration of Ancient Monuments, and they cover architecture, structural adequacy, mechanical services and acoustics.

Two items on the work list are worth a visitor’s attention, because they change what there will be to see afterwards. The first: the stage building and its mosaic floors, which the Ministry states “today remain unseen”, are to be uncovered and displayed. The second: the proscenium is to be made safe and, in the Ministry’s own word, visitable — a plain admission that it is not visitable now. Beyond that, the plan restores the eastern staircase and the ascending path towards the Peripatos so as to give back the Odeon’s original working connection with the Stoa of Eumenes, replaces the present scaffolding with a free-standing semicircular lighting support, rebuilds the external drainage and extends the forecourt with a raised platform over a covered space for a café and ticket offices.

There is also a piece of research here that had never been done anywhere. The acoustic study had to work out whether the sound of performances, natural and amplified, is damaging the south wall — and since no established method and no accepted safety limits existed for that question, the team developed an original methodology of its own. Nobody yet knew how much a concert costs a monument that is roughly 1,900 years old. And for the first time the monument will get a written code of operation, drawn up by a panel of scientists and artists, to govern what may be staged in it.

You do not go inside on an archaeological ticket

This part was true long before the closure and will still be true after it, so it is worth separating from the news. The interior of the Odeon is not part of the archaeological visit. The Ministry of Culture files it as a monument rather than as a site: its official record carries an address and a bibliography but publishes no ticket price, no opening hours and no visiting information, which every site record does carry.

The South Slope of the Acropolis, the enclosure the Odeon stands in, lists 7 monuments as its visitable ones — the Stoa of Eumenes, the sanctuary of Dionysos Eleuthereus, the Asklepieion, the chapel of Agia Paraskevi, the choregic monument of Nikias, the Theatre of Dionysos and the choregic monument of Thrasyllos. The Odeon is not among them. The site’s own description of the accessible route says the same thing from another angle: the visit runs “as far as the West Passageway (parodos) of the Theatre of Dionysus”, and the Odeon sits at the far western end, past where the route stops.

What did open the gate was a performance ticket from the Athens Epidaurus Festival, bought for a specific night. That is the only way anyone has walked into the auditorium in modern times, and since 30 June 2026 there have been no nights to buy. The practical answer today, then, is short: you look at it from outside, and that costs €0.00.

Tickets: €30.00 for the Acropolis and its Slopes

To walk the ground the Odeon stands on you need the ticket for the South Slope, and there is no such thing as a South Slope ticket. What exists is a single ticket called “Acropolis and its Slopes”: €30.00 full and €15.00 reduced, valid for the rock of the Acropolis, the South Slope and the North Slope together. That is the price charged on 22 September 2026 by the state ticket office, where the only product for the whole area is that one. It is the same €30.00 you pay for the Acropolis itself — one ticket covers both, which is the point of the next paragraph.

The trap is in a single sentence on the site’s official record, and it costs people an afternoon: “the ticket ‘Acropolis and Slopes’ is used only once and in case of exit from either the Acropolis Site or the South Slope, the visitor cannot re-enter any Site with the same ticket”. In other words, the €30.00 ticket is single-use across both. If you come down off the rock, walk out of the gate and then try to come back in at the South Slope, that ticket is spent. Do the rock and the slope in one continuous visit, and if you are coming down from the top, follow the signage after the Beulé Gate to the South Exit, which delivers you straight into the South Slope without leaving the site.

Three more things about the ticket. It carries a compulsory time slot, changeable up to 2 hours before your visit and up to 2 times per ticket, and the money is not refundable. It includes access to the Ministry’s official digital audio guide app, free since March 2026. And there are days when everyone walks in for nothing: 6 March, 18 April, 18 May, the last weekend of September and 28 October, plus the first and third Sunday of each month between 1 November and 31 March. In 2026 that September weekend falls on Saturday 26 and Sunday 27 September.

Opening hours and last entry on the South Slope

The South Slope does not have a summer timetable and a winter one. It has 6, and 3 of the changes fall inside 6 weeks of autumn, which is exactly when most people misplan the end of the day. Today, 22 September 2026, it opens at 08:00 and closes at 19:00, and the last entry is at 18:30.

So the timetable steps down on 1 October, again on 16 October, and again on 1 November, when it settles at 08:00 to 17:00 for the winter. The site is shut altogether on 1 January, 25 March, 1 May, Easter Sunday, 25 and 26 December, and it keeps special hours on Good Friday, 12:00 to 17:00, and Holy Saturday, 08:30 to 15:30. Two details that catch people out: the North Slope keeps different hours, 08:30 to 15:30 since 1 November 2025, and the site’s museum shop remains closed until further notice. All of it checked on 22 September 2026.

Getting there, and where to stand

The metro is Akropoli, on line 2, and from the exit everything is flat. The South Slope has its own gate at the junction of Thrasyllou street with the Dionysiou Areopagitou pedestrian street, about 320 metres from the station, roughly 5 minutes; keep walking west along the same pedestrian street and the Odeon is at about 800 metres, roughly 10 minutes. Those 2 distances are our own measurement on the map — no official source publishes a figure for either. Bus line 230 also stops here.

Where to stand is the practical question, and the answer is the pedestrian street itself. The Odeon’s entrance and its facade both face Dionysiou Areopagitou, and that is the address the Ministry gives the monument; from there you get the stage wall head-on, all 3 storeys of it, which is the face the building has kept. From inside the South Slope enclosure you reach its western end, against the Stoa of Eumenes, though the marked route stops short of the monument itself.

One accessibility note that saves a walk: the accessible toilets are outside the South Slope, at the Information Centre at Dionysiou Areopagitou 18-20, 50 metres east of the entrance. The enclosure itself is wheelchair-accessible from the main gate as far as the west parodos of the Theatre of Dionysos, with a companion recommended.

The numbers: 76 metres, 32 rows and 2 capacities

The Ministry of Culture’s record, signed by an archaeologist of the Ephorate, gives the measurements. The cavea is a semicircle of 76 metres in diameter, hewn out of the rock, with 32 rows of white marble seats in 2 tiers separated by a walkway of 1.20 metres. The orchestra is 19 metres across, paved in white marble slabs — that 19 is the orchestra, not the stage. The stage wall survives to 28 metres in height and had 3 storeys: arched openings along the upper part, porticoes of 3 columns and niches for statues below. Its masonry was not solid — poros blocks on both faces with quarry-faced rubble filling the middle.

The roof is the part that engineers still stop at. It spanned a radius of 38 metres with no internal fixings — in the Ministry’s phrase, “a unique construction achievement even in our days”. A roofed odeon of that size is why the building was used above all for musical contests, and why the ancient sources single out the cost of its timber.

Capacity comes with 2 owners and they should not be mixed. For antiquity, the Ministry of Culture gives a total of about 5,000. For the modern auditorium, the Athens Epidaurus Festival, which ran the venue, publishes 4,680 seats — the figure it reached once the re-marbling was finished and the ruined areas above the parodoi had been cleared. One is an archaeological estimate of the ancient building; the other is a seat count of the working theatre, after a 20th-century restoration. There is no single number that means both.

Herodes, Regilla and the cedar roof

The man who paid for it was Tiberius Claudius Atticus Herodes, from a leading Athenian family and a serial benefactor of the city, and he built it in memory of his wife Regilla, who died in 160 AD. It was the third odeon in Athens, after the odeon of Pericles on this same slope in the 5th century BC and the odeon of Agrippa down in the Ancient Agora of Athens in 15 BC.

As for when: the Ministry of Culture states plainly that the exact date of construction is unknown, and brackets it between Regilla’s death and 174 AD, the year the traveller Pausanias visited Athens and wrote about the building with great admiration. The bracket is 160 to 174 AD, and no dedicatory inscription for the Odeon survives.

Pausanias is worth quoting for what he does and does not say. At VII.20.6 he calls the Athenian odeon unrivalled in size and magnificence, built by an Athenian named Herodes “in memory of his dead wife”, and he explains why it is missing from his own book on Attica: he had finished writing about the Athenians before Herodes began the building. He does not name Regilla.

The famous detail — the roof of cedar — comes from somewhere else. It is Philostratus, in the Lives of the Sophists, who writes that Herodes dedicated the theatre to the Athenians in memory of Regilla “and he made its roof of cedar wood, though this wood is considered costly even for making statues”. A nice terminological wrinkle sits in that sentence: Philostratus calls the building a theatre, while Pausanias calls it an odeon. Two contemporaries, two words, one building. The Byzantine Suda, centuries later, independently records that Herodes built the Athenians a stadium “and a roofed theatre”.

Philostratus also tells the story the marble does not. Regilla died in her eighth month of pregnancy after being struck by a freedman of the household, and her brother Braduas brought a charge of murder against Herodes. Herodes was acquitted, and part of his defence, as Philostratus reports it, was the building itself: he would never have dedicated so fine a theatre to her memory had he been guilty. Herodes went further and turned his house into a mourning object, blackening its paintings and rooms with hangings, dyes and the dark marble of Lesbos — which drew from the sophist Lucius the line that he was insulting Regilla by eating white radishes in a black house. An Athenian inscription of the time gives her a gentler epithet: “the light of the house”.

From the Herulians to Maria Callas

The Odeon burned in 267 AD, in the Herulian raid that flattened much of ancient Athens, and unlike other damaged buildings it was never rebuilt. Its south wall was absorbed into the late Roman wall of the 3rd century; in the 13th century the tall stage wall became part of the Rizokastro, the circuit that ringed the base of the Acropolis. By the 14th century the accumulated earth had buried the lower part of the south wall so completely that the entrances were gone, and the Italian traveller Niccolò da Martoni took the whole thing for a bridge.

It stayed useful as masonry. In 1826, during the Ottoman siege of the Acropolis, the French philhellene general Charles Fabvier and his men got into the citadel through the Odeon, carrying supplies and gunpowder to the Greeks holding out above. By 1857 the cavea lay under 12 metres of earth, with crops growing on top of it. The Archaeological Society, with the archaeologist K. Pittakis, cleared it between 1848 and 1858 — 10 years of nothing but shifting earth — and what emerged was in poor condition, only a few rows of seats in place and heavily calcined by the fire.

The theatre came back to life in stages. The first performance of ancient drama in the excavated Odeon was in 1867; repairs followed in 1898, 1900 and 1922. In September 1920, Kalomiris’s Symphony of Valour had its triumphant premiere here in the presence of the Prime Minister, Eleftherios Venizelos. In 1936 wooden seats went into the lower tiers for a state season of ancient drama. And during the German occupation the newly founded Greek National Opera sang on this stage with a young Maria Callas — then still Maria Kalogeropoulou — in Beethoven’s Fidelio and in Kalomiris’s The Master Builder.

The restoration that made the modern venue was decided by the Archaeological Council in 1947, in the middle of the civil war, and directed by Professor Anastasios Orlandos; the present entrance, with its monumental marble and irregular flights of steps down from Dionysiou Areopagitou, was designed by the architect Dimitris Pikionis. The marble work on the monument itself the Ministry dates to 1952-1953, using marble from the Dionysus area. Not everyone approved: the architect and planner Konstantinos Doxiadis publicly opposed re-clading the whole theatre in marble, and the argument slowed the work down. From the middle of the 1950s the Odeon has been the home of the Athens Festival — the run of summers that ended, roughly 7 decades later, on 30 June 2026.

Nearby, with their own free audio guides

The obvious pairing is the Acropolis, because it is literally the same €30.00 ticket and the same visit: come down from the rock through the Beulé Gate and the South Exit and you are on the slope. Below it lies the Ancient Agora of Athens, which holds the odeon of Agrippa — the second of the 3 Athenian odeons, and the one this building came after. And for a working open-air theatre rather than a closed one, Lycabettus Hill has a 3,000-seat amphitheatre in an old quarry, free to walk up to. All of them, and the rest of the city, are on the free audio guides of Athens page.

Reading this in Spanish? The same guide, written for a Spanish-speaking visitor and narrated in Spanish, is at Odeón de Herodes Ático en vozviajera.com.