Athens gets more sun than most cities, so a wet afternoon can catch you with no plan. This list is for those days: indoor spots where kids can climb, bowl, skate, cook or run off energy in a soft-play room, plus museums with hands-on science, old cars and ships to explore. Everything here has a roof, so the weather stops mattering.
Royal Bowling is an indoor games hall with 15 bowling lanes, a roller skating rink, billiard and ping pong tables, and arcade and board games. A kids' playland sits alongside the lanes.
Kids' birthday parties take over the hall with black light, light effects and dance music, and include bowling, skating, food and decorations.
Bowling Center Ilion is a 2,000 m² indoor games hall built around 12 bowling lanes. Billiards tables and virtual reality games share the same floor, so kids who tire of bowling have somewhere to go next. It suits school-age kids and teens more than toddlers.
A ten-pin bowling alley that also has virtual reality games, video games, ping pong and billiards under one roof, so kids can switch between them in one visit.
The venue hosts kids' birthday parties, with food and decorations planned around what the family asks for. It suits a mixed group: older kids and adults bowl while younger siblings move on to the games.
The Museum of Experiments is a hands-on science center where kids run physics, chemistry and biology experiments themselves, guided by a museum educator. Sunday workshops are grouped by age, from kitchen-cupboard chemistry for preschoolers and a parent to sessions on light and color for school-age kids.
There is also a science escape room, the Thomas Edison Edition, where older kids solve puzzles by completing experiments.
Planet Physics is an interactive science center built around physics. Its exhibition has around 30 hands-on exhibits, grouped into themed sections across more than 1,000 square meters, and some are found nowhere else in Southeastern Europe.
Specialized staff guide visitors through the exhibits, so kids learn by trying each one themselves. Schools and other groups can book educational programs pitched to their age and level.
Mystery Lab is an escape room venue with movie-set rooms and a laser tag arena. Teams solve linked puzzles, each answer leading to the next, until they find the way out.
For kids' parties, the rooms run with no actors and nothing scary: hunt for Captain James' treasure aboard his ship, or signal a satellite from a secret lab on Mystery Island.
The Hellenic Motor Museum fills the top three floors of the Athenian Capitol building with more than 110 cars from the 19th and 20th centuries, from veteran and vintage models to modern classics.
Kids can walk through an Old Car Workshop that ran from the 1930s to the 1960s, packed with over 3,000 period objects, and the museum also has a Formula 1 simulator.
The museum traces Greek seafaring from prehistoric times to today across more than 2,500 exhibits, from ship models and navigation instruments to naval paintings. One hall recreates a 19th-century boatyard showing how a wooden trechandiri was built.
Outside, kids can see the turret of the submarine Papanikolis and anchors from ships of the Battle of Navarino. Part of the ancient Konon walls sits at the entrance.
Run by retired staff of the Athens-Piraeus electric railway, this museum fills the old post office of Piraeus station, where Line 1 ends. The ground floor centers on an old wooden train carriage. Three more levels show objects from the stations, plus photographs and documents from the railway, the Piraeus-Perama light railway and the old harbor tramway.
Little Kook is a themed cafe whose decor goes over the top, from the props hanging off the ceiling to the tables set out in the lane. Kids come for the look of the place as much as the food, and every corner has something to spot. It sits in Psyrri, the old lanes just north of Monastiraki.
Kids Cooking Club has run cooking classes for children since 2006 and calls itself Europe's first cooking school for kids. Groups of up to 8 work in a kitchen built to their height, with induction hobs, safe knives and a chef plus educators.
Kids cook breakfasts, snacks, meals and sweets from fresh ingredients, then taste what they made. The school also runs camps and cooking parties.
RockWay is an indoor climbing center with 300 square meters of walls set with overhangs, roofs, slabs and corners, for both roped climbing and bouldering.
The kids' program takes children through to their teens, with instructors turning climbing into games for first-timers and steady training for keen ones. There is also a competition team, and the gym runs one-day climbing trips to crags around Attica.
Exit War's kids arena is a laser tag course built for children. Players suit up in tactical gear and split into teams, then hunt each other through a dark, lit-up indoor maze.
It suits kids who like running, hiding and competing in a group, and it often hosts birthday parties. Very young or nervous kids may find the dark and the noise a lot.
SportsPark is a large indoor entertainment center with auto-scoring bowling lanes, a 600 m² black-light laser tag arena themed as a space battle, and an enclosed disco roller rink.
The renovated soft play has a jungle climbing frame, a trampoline and a small Mundialito soccer pitch. There are also bumper cars, a mini train, billiards, ping pong, and a cafe and restaurant for parents.
A two-floor indoor entertainment center inside the Colosseum shopping center. Downstairs are 12 bowling lanes with automatic scoring, billiards tables and a snack bar.
Upstairs, kids get a roller skating rink, three trampolines and a 200 m² supervised play area with ball pits, slides, inflatables, mini football and a two-story play structure. Galaxy Wars, a separate laser tag arena, sits in the building next door.
Super Bowl is a big games hall with 25 bowling lanes spread over three rooms, two roller skating rinks styled on the 1970s, 28 pool and snooker tables, and 10 ping-pong tables. A café serves club sandwiches and waffles with ice cream between games.
Kids' birthday parties run on lanes fitted with bumper rails, with balls and shoes sized for children.
Ice n Skate is a year-round rink with an 800 square meter pad of natural ice. Kids can skate freely, take figure skating lessons, or join ice hockey and curling programs. Staff help pick skates and give beginners balance tips, and a supervisor is on the ice on weekends and holidays.
A café overlooks the rink, and there is a skate shop, lockers and a party room.
Honey Nest is a two-floor family space with a playroom of wooden toys in soft pastel colors, a cafe beside it, and a concept store selling wooden toys and gifts from European brands. There are no screens or electronic toys.
Seasonal workshops cover crafts, sensory play for the youngest, art and storytelling, and the space hosts private birthday parties.
Dreamhouse is an indoor play area with a lounge cafe and full kitchen beside it, so parents sit on sofas with coffee or a meal and keep the play floor in view. Kids play freely, use Montessori-style materials and fine-motor games, and join a different arts and crafts project each day, led by an early-years educator at no extra charge.
Perperino has run as an indoor play center for 28 years. Inside are a ball pit with climbing nets, a toddler area with a slide and a bouncy castle, and arcade rides. Party rooms host birthdays, and birthday cakes can be ordered.
Volta Cloud is the roller and lounge branch of Volta Fun Park, on the third floor of Athens Metro Mall. Kids put on roller skates and lap an indoor rink styled in pop and disco.
There is also DigiWall, an interactive climbing wall built on video game technology, and a corner of virtual reality games. The venue hosts birthday and name day parties, with the space set up to order.
PLAYMOBIL FunPark is a 1,100 square meter indoor play center where kids play with Playmobil toys across eight themed areas: knights, pirates, fairies, animal parks, dollhouses and royal palaces. Toddlers have their own PLAYMOBIL JUNIOR space.
Toys stay in their themed area, and running and climbing on the structures are not allowed, so it suits imaginative play more than burning energy. Lechuza Cafe and a Playmobil store are on site.
Theatre Epi Kolono is a neighborhood theater that runs a Children's Stage alongside its main program of plays for adults. The kids' shows are short pocket-size performances, full of humor, built to hold the attention of preschoolers and kids in their first school years.
They are staged in a small brick house with a tiled roof in the theater's garden, a close-up setting where kids can laugh and join in.
The Athens Concert Hall, known locally as the Megaron, has four halls: two large ones of nearly 2,000 and 1,750 seats for concerts, opera and ballet, and two smaller ones for chamber music and dance. The biggest, the Christos Lambrakis Hall, holds the largest pipe organ in Greece.
Its Megaron for Children season puts on concerts and stage shows made for young audiences.
The Greek National Opera, founded in 1939, has performed at the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Cultural Center since 2017. It runs two halls: the main Stavros Niarchos Hall and the Alternative Stage, a smaller 300 to 400 seat space for new music theater.
The program includes operas made for young audiences, about an hour long, with family performances on weekend and holiday mornings alongside shows for schools.
The National Library of Greece is housed in the Renzo Piano-designed Stavros Niarchos Foundation Cultural Center. Its lending section is the part for families: books, magazines, board games and video games, chosen for children, teens and adults.
A separate children's library space sits within the lending section, and the library runs hands-on programs for families built around its collections.
XPLORE fills 4,500 square meters inside the Golden Hall mall with three zones. Science has hands-on exhibits on sound, light, air and water, including a giant floor piano and a water table. Adventure has a castle mirror maze, a dinosaur jungle, a construction zone with a life-size digger, a TV studio and a race track. Oceans is an aquarium with 20 tanks of sharks, rays and jellyfish.
The Zoological Museum belongs to the University of Athens biology department, and its collections date back to 1858. Across 2,200 m² it shows around 500 mammals as mounts or skeletons, including a tiger, about 2,500 birds covering every species found in Greece, plus nests and eggs, and around 1,000 reptiles, amphibians and fish. Dioramas recreate Greek and world habitats, with a focus on endangered Greek species.
The first museum in Greece devoted to jewelry, set in Ilias Lalaounis's former workshop building just below the Acropolis. The permanent displays draw on 50 collections he designed between 1957 and 2002, inspired by ancient Greek art, nature and children's designs, alongside two temporary exhibitions a year.
In the ZEM and ZEDET artists' studios, visitors can watch jewelers demonstrate ancient and modern metalsmithing techniques.
A national museum of Byzantine art in the Villa Ilissia, an 1848 mansion built for the Duchess of Plaisance. More than 25,000 objects span the 3rd century to the modern era: icons, frescoes, marble carvings, pottery, textiles and manuscripts, plus the wall paintings of a Byzantine church from Episkopi in Evrytania.
Free printed educational material for families waits at the gallery entrance, and the garden has a cafe.
The Athens Olympic Museum tells the story of the Games from ancient Olympia through the 1896 revival to Athens 2004, using videos, augmented-reality displays and hands-on interactive exhibits next to original objects such as Olympic torches.
A full section is given to the Paralympic Games and their athletes. The museum sits in the Golden Hall mall, linked by a footbridge to the Olympic Stadium (OAKA).
A two-story 1840 mansion with an inner courtyard holds the largest collection of Greek folk instruments, from the mid-18th century on, gathered from the islands, the mainland, Constantinople, Pontus, Cappadocia and Cyprus. Drums and wind instruments fill the ground floor, string instruments the first floor, and bells and sound-making objects the basement.
An audio guide app covers the highlights, and summer brings concerts in the garden.
Greece's national art museum covers Greek and European art from the 14th to the 20th century. The focus is Greek painting from after the Byzantine era, hung alongside El Greco's The Concert of the Angels and works by Dürer, Rubens, Picasso and Rodin.
It suits kids old enough to enjoy an hour or two of looking at paintings. Toddlers who need to run will find little here.
A museum of art made by children. Its collection holds more than 10,000 paintings and constructions by kids aged 4 to 14, from drawing competitions, donations and the museum's own workshops, and its exhibitions take on themes such as diversity and racism.
Kids come to make art themselves: workshops led by the museum's artists start from a famous painter, such as Degas or Kusama, and supply every material.
Part of the Benaki Museum, the Toy Museum is housed in the seaside Kouloura Mansion. It is built on Maria Argyriadi's collection of 20,000 vintage toys, games, children's books and clothes, one of the largest in Europe. Kids get to see what children played with and wore generations ago, and compare it with their own toy box.
The Spathario Museum is dedicated to Karagiozis, the quick-witted hero of Greek shadow puppet theater. Its rooms hold brightly painted puppet figures, stage sets and the story of the Spatharis family of puppeteers, in a neoclassical building owned by the Municipality of Maroussi.
The museum was founded with the puppeteer Evgenios Spatharis and runs guided tours and educational programs for children and adults.
More than 100 working reconstructions of ancient Greek inventions fill this museum, from Philo's robot maid and early automata to the Antikythera Mechanism, early cinema devices and telecommunication systems. Each model is built from ancient texts and archaeological evidence.
A separate exhibition holds 45 reconstructed ancient instruments and toys, with live demonstrations of how they were played. It suits school-age kids who like gadgets and how things work.
The museum holds Cycladic figurines, ancient Greek and Cypriot art, and a gallery on daily life in antiquity, spread over two buildings joined by a corridor.
Families can rent the Family Kit at the entrance: a box of maps, exhibit copies, story cards and an augmented reality app that puts kids in photos with the largest figurine. Weekend workshops run by age group, from toddlers with a parent to 12-year-olds.
A science and technology museum in a restored neoclassical house in Thissio. The permanent EUREKA exhibition shows working models of ancient Greek inventions: a mechanical maidservant that pours wine into a guest's cup, Heron's temple doors that open when a fire is lit on the altar, and a large see-through model of the Antikythera Mechanism, a 2,000-year-old analog computer that predicted eclipses. Best for curious school-age kids.
The permanent Natural History Exhibition runs through eight galleries: zoology, insects, reptiles, marine life, plants, birds, geology and fossils. The first botany halls were designed with support from the Natural History Museum in London.
At the GAIA Centre, "Climate Change and Us" is an interactive exhibition, and a digital dome screens animated films about dinosaurs, coral reefs and space. NATU Restaurant sits in the museum garden.
Hellenic Cosmos is the cultural center of the Foundation of the Hellenic World, set in an old industrial complex on Pireos Street. Its landmark is the Tholos, a domed virtual-reality theater with a 350 m² screen that takes audiences from Ancient Olympia and the Agora of Athens to outer space.
Kids can also try VR headsets, watch children's theater at the Theatron, see exhibitions and join weekend workshops.
The Eugenides Foundation's digital planetarium seats 278 under a 24.5-meter hemispherical dome, with full-dome shows on astronomy and other sciences.
Family titles include The Stellars, where three stranded aliens ask the audience to help save their rainforest, and The Enchanted Reef, about two fish on a mission to save a reef. The same building holds the Science and Technology Center, with interactive exhibits on physics, chemistry and robotics.
An interactive museum of optical illusions where visitors step into the exhibits and pose for photos that trick the eye. Kids cross the spinning Vortex Tunnel, test their balance in the Tilted Room, walk through the upside-down Reversed Room, and grow or shrink in the big and small room. Mirror rooms, hands-on installations and puzzle images fill the rest of the route.
The Children's Museum of Athens, run by the Hellenic Children's Museum, fills the ground floor of the Athens Conservatoire building with hands-on exhibits. Kids play in a biscuit-themed kitchen, play vet at the Pet Care Clinic, blow bubbles, try math games in Hello Pythagoras!, study maps and practice road safety. A separate playspace is set up for babies and toddlers, and kids can make things to take home.
Greece's largest archaeology museum holds more than 20,000 objects, spanning Greek history from prehistory to late antiquity. Kids tend to make for the Mycenaean gold, including the mask once wrongly named for Agamemnon, the Artemision Bronze, Egyptian mummies, Bronze Age wall paintings from Akrotiri on Santorini, and the Antikythera mechanism.
Out front, a garden lined with sculptures has a café.
The Acropolis Museum holds the sculptures and objects found on the Acropolis rock and its slopes. Glass floors look down onto the excavated remains of an ancient neighborhood, which you can also walk through from the courtyard.
Inside are the original Caryatids from the Erechtheion and Archaic statues with traces of their paint. The top-floor Parthenon Gallery spaces its columns like the temple's, with glass walls facing the Acropolis.
Athens gets more sun than most cities, so a wet afternoon can catch you with no plan. This list is for those days: indoor spots where kids can climb, bowl, skate, cook or run off energy in a soft-play room, plus museums with hands-on science, old cars and ships to explore. Everything here has a roof, so the weather stops mattering.
Royal Bowling is an indoor games hall with 15 bowling lanes, a roller skating rink, billiard and ping pong tables, and arcade and board games. A kids' playland sits alongside the lanes.
Kids' birthday parties take over the hall with black light, light effects and dance music, and include bowling, skating, food and decorations.
Bowling Center Ilion is a 2,000 m² indoor games hall built around 12 bowling lanes. Billiards tables and virtual reality games share the same floor, so kids who tire of bowling have somewhere to go next. It suits school-age kids and teens more than toddlers.
A ten-pin bowling alley that also has virtual reality games, video games, ping pong and billiards under one roof, so kids can switch between them in one visit.
The venue hosts kids' birthday parties, with food and decorations planned around what the family asks for. It suits a mixed group: older kids and adults bowl while younger siblings move on to the games.
The Museum of Experiments is a hands-on science center where kids run physics, chemistry and biology experiments themselves, guided by a museum educator. Sunday workshops are grouped by age, from kitchen-cupboard chemistry for preschoolers and a parent to sessions on light and color for school-age kids.
There is also a science escape room, the Thomas Edison Edition, where older kids solve puzzles by completing experiments.
Planet Physics is an interactive science center built around physics. Its exhibition has around 30 hands-on exhibits, grouped into themed sections across more than 1,000 square meters, and some are found nowhere else in Southeastern Europe.
Specialized staff guide visitors through the exhibits, so kids learn by trying each one themselves. Schools and other groups can book educational programs pitched to their age and level.
Mystery Lab is an escape room venue with movie-set rooms and a laser tag arena. Teams solve linked puzzles, each answer leading to the next, until they find the way out.
For kids' parties, the rooms run with no actors and nothing scary: hunt for Captain James' treasure aboard his ship, or signal a satellite from a secret lab on Mystery Island.
The Hellenic Motor Museum fills the top three floors of the Athenian Capitol building with more than 110 cars from the 19th and 20th centuries, from veteran and vintage models to modern classics.
Kids can walk through an Old Car Workshop that ran from the 1930s to the 1960s, packed with over 3,000 period objects, and the museum also has a Formula 1 simulator.
The museum traces Greek seafaring from prehistoric times to today across more than 2,500 exhibits, from ship models and navigation instruments to naval paintings. One hall recreates a 19th-century boatyard showing how a wooden trechandiri was built.
Outside, kids can see the turret of the submarine Papanikolis and anchors from ships of the Battle of Navarino. Part of the ancient Konon walls sits at the entrance.
Run by retired staff of the Athens-Piraeus electric railway, this museum fills the old post office of Piraeus station, where Line 1 ends. The ground floor centers on an old wooden train carriage. Three more levels show objects from the stations, plus photographs and documents from the railway, the Piraeus-Perama light railway and the old harbor tramway.
Little Kook is a themed cafe whose decor goes over the top, from the props hanging off the ceiling to the tables set out in the lane. Kids come for the look of the place as much as the food, and every corner has something to spot. It sits in Psyrri, the old lanes just north of Monastiraki.
Kids Cooking Club has run cooking classes for children since 2006 and calls itself Europe's first cooking school for kids. Groups of up to 8 work in a kitchen built to their height, with induction hobs, safe knives and a chef plus educators.
Kids cook breakfasts, snacks, meals and sweets from fresh ingredients, then taste what they made. The school also runs camps and cooking parties.
RockWay is an indoor climbing center with 300 square meters of walls set with overhangs, roofs, slabs and corners, for both roped climbing and bouldering.
The kids' program takes children through to their teens, with instructors turning climbing into games for first-timers and steady training for keen ones. There is also a competition team, and the gym runs one-day climbing trips to crags around Attica.
Exit War's kids arena is a laser tag course built for children. Players suit up in tactical gear and split into teams, then hunt each other through a dark, lit-up indoor maze.
It suits kids who like running, hiding and competing in a group, and it often hosts birthday parties. Very young or nervous kids may find the dark and the noise a lot.
SportsPark is a large indoor entertainment center with auto-scoring bowling lanes, a 600 m² black-light laser tag arena themed as a space battle, and an enclosed disco roller rink.
The renovated soft play has a jungle climbing frame, a trampoline and a small Mundialito soccer pitch. There are also bumper cars, a mini train, billiards, ping pong, and a cafe and restaurant for parents.
A two-floor indoor entertainment center inside the Colosseum shopping center. Downstairs are 12 bowling lanes with automatic scoring, billiards tables and a snack bar.
Upstairs, kids get a roller skating rink, three trampolines and a 200 m² supervised play area with ball pits, slides, inflatables, mini football and a two-story play structure. Galaxy Wars, a separate laser tag arena, sits in the building next door.
Super Bowl is a big games hall with 25 bowling lanes spread over three rooms, two roller skating rinks styled on the 1970s, 28 pool and snooker tables, and 10 ping-pong tables. A café serves club sandwiches and waffles with ice cream between games.
Kids' birthday parties run on lanes fitted with bumper rails, with balls and shoes sized for children.
Ice n Skate is a year-round rink with an 800 square meter pad of natural ice. Kids can skate freely, take figure skating lessons, or join ice hockey and curling programs. Staff help pick skates and give beginners balance tips, and a supervisor is on the ice on weekends and holidays.
A café overlooks the rink, and there is a skate shop, lockers and a party room.
Honey Nest is a two-floor family space with a playroom of wooden toys in soft pastel colors, a cafe beside it, and a concept store selling wooden toys and gifts from European brands. There are no screens or electronic toys.
Seasonal workshops cover crafts, sensory play for the youngest, art and storytelling, and the space hosts private birthday parties.
Dreamhouse is an indoor play area with a lounge cafe and full kitchen beside it, so parents sit on sofas with coffee or a meal and keep the play floor in view. Kids play freely, use Montessori-style materials and fine-motor games, and join a different arts and crafts project each day, led by an early-years educator at no extra charge.
Perperino has run as an indoor play center for 28 years. Inside are a ball pit with climbing nets, a toddler area with a slide and a bouncy castle, and arcade rides. Party rooms host birthdays, and birthday cakes can be ordered.
Volta Cloud is the roller and lounge branch of Volta Fun Park, on the third floor of Athens Metro Mall. Kids put on roller skates and lap an indoor rink styled in pop and disco.
There is also DigiWall, an interactive climbing wall built on video game technology, and a corner of virtual reality games. The venue hosts birthday and name day parties, with the space set up to order.
PLAYMOBIL FunPark is a 1,100 square meter indoor play center where kids play with Playmobil toys across eight themed areas: knights, pirates, fairies, animal parks, dollhouses and royal palaces. Toddlers have their own PLAYMOBIL JUNIOR space.
Toys stay in their themed area, and running and climbing on the structures are not allowed, so it suits imaginative play more than burning energy. Lechuza Cafe and a Playmobil store are on site.
Theatre Epi Kolono is a neighborhood theater that runs a Children's Stage alongside its main program of plays for adults. The kids' shows are short pocket-size performances, full of humor, built to hold the attention of preschoolers and kids in their first school years.
They are staged in a small brick house with a tiled roof in the theater's garden, a close-up setting where kids can laugh and join in.
The Athens Concert Hall, known locally as the Megaron, has four halls: two large ones of nearly 2,000 and 1,750 seats for concerts, opera and ballet, and two smaller ones for chamber music and dance. The biggest, the Christos Lambrakis Hall, holds the largest pipe organ in Greece.
Its Megaron for Children season puts on concerts and stage shows made for young audiences.
The Greek National Opera, founded in 1939, has performed at the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Cultural Center since 2017. It runs two halls: the main Stavros Niarchos Hall and the Alternative Stage, a smaller 300 to 400 seat space for new music theater.
The program includes operas made for young audiences, about an hour long, with family performances on weekend and holiday mornings alongside shows for schools.
The National Library of Greece is housed in the Renzo Piano-designed Stavros Niarchos Foundation Cultural Center. Its lending section is the part for families: books, magazines, board games and video games, chosen for children, teens and adults.
A separate children's library space sits within the lending section, and the library runs hands-on programs for families built around its collections.
XPLORE fills 4,500 square meters inside the Golden Hall mall with three zones. Science has hands-on exhibits on sound, light, air and water, including a giant floor piano and a water table. Adventure has a castle mirror maze, a dinosaur jungle, a construction zone with a life-size digger, a TV studio and a race track. Oceans is an aquarium with 20 tanks of sharks, rays and jellyfish.
The Zoological Museum belongs to the University of Athens biology department, and its collections date back to 1858. Across 2,200 m² it shows around 500 mammals as mounts or skeletons, including a tiger, about 2,500 birds covering every species found in Greece, plus nests and eggs, and around 1,000 reptiles, amphibians and fish. Dioramas recreate Greek and world habitats, with a focus on endangered Greek species.
The first museum in Greece devoted to jewelry, set in Ilias Lalaounis's former workshop building just below the Acropolis. The permanent displays draw on 50 collections he designed between 1957 and 2002, inspired by ancient Greek art, nature and children's designs, alongside two temporary exhibitions a year.
In the ZEM and ZEDET artists' studios, visitors can watch jewelers demonstrate ancient and modern metalsmithing techniques.
A national museum of Byzantine art in the Villa Ilissia, an 1848 mansion built for the Duchess of Plaisance. More than 25,000 objects span the 3rd century to the modern era: icons, frescoes, marble carvings, pottery, textiles and manuscripts, plus the wall paintings of a Byzantine church from Episkopi in Evrytania.
Free printed educational material for families waits at the gallery entrance, and the garden has a cafe.
The Athens Olympic Museum tells the story of the Games from ancient Olympia through the 1896 revival to Athens 2004, using videos, augmented-reality displays and hands-on interactive exhibits next to original objects such as Olympic torches.
A full section is given to the Paralympic Games and their athletes. The museum sits in the Golden Hall mall, linked by a footbridge to the Olympic Stadium (OAKA).
A two-story 1840 mansion with an inner courtyard holds the largest collection of Greek folk instruments, from the mid-18th century on, gathered from the islands, the mainland, Constantinople, Pontus, Cappadocia and Cyprus. Drums and wind instruments fill the ground floor, string instruments the first floor, and bells and sound-making objects the basement.
An audio guide app covers the highlights, and summer brings concerts in the garden.
Greece's national art museum covers Greek and European art from the 14th to the 20th century. The focus is Greek painting from after the Byzantine era, hung alongside El Greco's The Concert of the Angels and works by Dürer, Rubens, Picasso and Rodin.
It suits kids old enough to enjoy an hour or two of looking at paintings. Toddlers who need to run will find little here.
A museum of art made by children. Its collection holds more than 10,000 paintings and constructions by kids aged 4 to 14, from drawing competitions, donations and the museum's own workshops, and its exhibitions take on themes such as diversity and racism.
Kids come to make art themselves: workshops led by the museum's artists start from a famous painter, such as Degas or Kusama, and supply every material.
Part of the Benaki Museum, the Toy Museum is housed in the seaside Kouloura Mansion. It is built on Maria Argyriadi's collection of 20,000 vintage toys, games, children's books and clothes, one of the largest in Europe. Kids get to see what children played with and wore generations ago, and compare it with their own toy box.
The Spathario Museum is dedicated to Karagiozis, the quick-witted hero of Greek shadow puppet theater. Its rooms hold brightly painted puppet figures, stage sets and the story of the Spatharis family of puppeteers, in a neoclassical building owned by the Municipality of Maroussi.
The museum was founded with the puppeteer Evgenios Spatharis and runs guided tours and educational programs for children and adults.
More than 100 working reconstructions of ancient Greek inventions fill this museum, from Philo's robot maid and early automata to the Antikythera Mechanism, early cinema devices and telecommunication systems. Each model is built from ancient texts and archaeological evidence.
A separate exhibition holds 45 reconstructed ancient instruments and toys, with live demonstrations of how they were played. It suits school-age kids who like gadgets and how things work.
The museum holds Cycladic figurines, ancient Greek and Cypriot art, and a gallery on daily life in antiquity, spread over two buildings joined by a corridor.
Families can rent the Family Kit at the entrance: a box of maps, exhibit copies, story cards and an augmented reality app that puts kids in photos with the largest figurine. Weekend workshops run by age group, from toddlers with a parent to 12-year-olds.
A science and technology museum in a restored neoclassical house in Thissio. The permanent EUREKA exhibition shows working models of ancient Greek inventions: a mechanical maidservant that pours wine into a guest's cup, Heron's temple doors that open when a fire is lit on the altar, and a large see-through model of the Antikythera Mechanism, a 2,000-year-old analog computer that predicted eclipses. Best for curious school-age kids.
The permanent Natural History Exhibition runs through eight galleries: zoology, insects, reptiles, marine life, plants, birds, geology and fossils. The first botany halls were designed with support from the Natural History Museum in London.
At the GAIA Centre, "Climate Change and Us" is an interactive exhibition, and a digital dome screens animated films about dinosaurs, coral reefs and space. NATU Restaurant sits in the museum garden.
Hellenic Cosmos is the cultural center of the Foundation of the Hellenic World, set in an old industrial complex on Pireos Street. Its landmark is the Tholos, a domed virtual-reality theater with a 350 m² screen that takes audiences from Ancient Olympia and the Agora of Athens to outer space.
Kids can also try VR headsets, watch children's theater at the Theatron, see exhibitions and join weekend workshops.
The Eugenides Foundation's digital planetarium seats 278 under a 24.5-meter hemispherical dome, with full-dome shows on astronomy and other sciences.
Family titles include The Stellars, where three stranded aliens ask the audience to help save their rainforest, and The Enchanted Reef, about two fish on a mission to save a reef. The same building holds the Science and Technology Center, with interactive exhibits on physics, chemistry and robotics.
An interactive museum of optical illusions where visitors step into the exhibits and pose for photos that trick the eye. Kids cross the spinning Vortex Tunnel, test their balance in the Tilted Room, walk through the upside-down Reversed Room, and grow or shrink in the big and small room. Mirror rooms, hands-on installations and puzzle images fill the rest of the route.
The Children's Museum of Athens, run by the Hellenic Children's Museum, fills the ground floor of the Athens Conservatoire building with hands-on exhibits. Kids play in a biscuit-themed kitchen, play vet at the Pet Care Clinic, blow bubbles, try math games in Hello Pythagoras!, study maps and practice road safety. A separate playspace is set up for babies and toddlers, and kids can make things to take home.
Greece's largest archaeology museum holds more than 20,000 objects, spanning Greek history from prehistory to late antiquity. Kids tend to make for the Mycenaean gold, including the mask once wrongly named for Agamemnon, the Artemision Bronze, Egyptian mummies, Bronze Age wall paintings from Akrotiri on Santorini, and the Antikythera mechanism.
Out front, a garden lined with sculptures has a café.
The Acropolis Museum holds the sculptures and objects found on the Acropolis rock and its slopes. Glass floors look down onto the excavated remains of an ancient neighborhood, which you can also walk through from the courtyard.
Inside are the original Caryatids from the Erechtheion and Archaic statues with traces of their paint. The top-floor Parthenon Gallery spaces its columns like the temple's, with glass walls facing the Acropolis.
