Marathon

A quiet plain, a grass-covered mound, and one of the few places where you can stand on the exact ground that changed the direction of European history. Forty-two kilometres from Athens — the distance is not a coincidence.

Tour highlights

• The Tomb of the Athenians (Tymbos)
• The Archaeological Museum of Marathon
• The plain where the battle was fought
• The start of the classic Marathon course
• Lake Marathon and its marble dam
• Schinias beach and pine forest
• The Mycenaean tholos tomb at Vrana
• Rafina or Nea Makri for lunch by the sea

About this journey

In 490 BC roughly eleven thousand Athenians and Plataeans faced a far larger Persian expeditionary force on this plain. The Greek line thinned its centre and strengthened its wings, let the Persian centre push forward, then folded in from both sides. The Persians broke and ran for their ships.

The Athenian dead — 192 men — were burned and buried where they fell, under a mound of earth rather than in the city cemetery, an honour reserved for them alone. That mound, the Tymbos, is still there: about ten metres high and fifty across, identified with certainty when the archaeologist Valerios Stais excavated it in 1890–91 and found the ash layer, the burnt offerings and the black-figure vases. You walk around it in five minutes. It is one of the most understated monuments in Greece and, for many visitors, the most moving.

The Archaeological Museum of Marathon, a short drive away, holds the finds from the tumulus and from the surrounding sites, including the Mycenaean cemetery at Vrana and material from the sanctuary of the Egyptian gods at Brexiza.

And then the legend. Herodotus tells of Pheidippides running to Sparta for help; later tradition has an Athenian running from this plain to the city with a single word — “nenikikamen”, we have won — and dying as he said it. The story is almost certainly a later invention. The 1896 Olympic organisers used it anyway, and the modern marathon starts a few hundred metres from where you will be standing.

Good to know