National Archaeological Museum Athens

National Archaeological Museum Athens tickets: guided tour or audio guide, and the Tuesday trap

National Archaeological Museum Athens tickets come down to one choice: a two-hour small-group tour with entry from about €59, or a plain ticket with an audio guide from about €26 that you walk round at your own pace. What the ticket buys is priority access at the entrance and, on the guided option, a licensed guide who takes you straight to the Mask of Agamemnon, the Antikythera Mechanism and the bronze Zeus without a wrong turn in between. That last point matters more here than at any other museum in the city. This is the largest museum in Greece, with more than 11,000 exhibits over about 8,000 square metres of galleries, and it is very easy to spend an hour in the wrong rooms.

This page sets out the guided-or-plain decision, the real partner prices, the verified opening hours (including the Tuesday afternoon start that catches people out in both seasons), the free days, how to get there by metro from Omonia or Victoria, and a route through the building by room number. The short version: if this is your first visit, take the small-group tour, go on a weekday morning, and leave time afterwards for the Egyptian rooms and the Thera frescoes upstairs, which are worth an extra hour on your own. It pairs naturally with the Acropolis Museum, which covers one building's sculpture where this one covers the whole country.

Guided tour or plain ticket?

Guided, for a first visit. The small-group National Archaeological Museum tour on GetYourGuide runs two hours with a licensed live guide, is offered in nine languages including English, German, French and Spanish, and costs from about €59 per person with the museum ticket included. It carries a 4.6 rating from 46 reviews, a small count because the product is newer than the tickets, and it can be cancelled free up to 24 hours before the start. The tour is built around the pieces everyone comes for: the Mycenaean gold, the Antikythera Mechanism and the Artemision bronze. A guide earns the fee here in a way an audio guide does not, because the museum is arranged by collection and period rather than by story, and the labels assume you already know your Archaic from your Hellenistic. There is also a tour-only option if you are covering admission another way, through a pass for example. You then need to arrive 20 minutes early to do so.

Headout, our first-choice partner, sells no shared guided tour of this museum at the moment. What it does sell is a private two-hour tour with a licensed archaeologist from about €321 per group, entry included, with free cancellation up to 48 hours before. The price varies with the size of your group, so it makes most sense for a family or four friends rather than a couple. GetYourGuide has a private equivalent for about €196 per group of up to six, cancellable up to 24 hours before, rated 4.7 from 51 reviews.

The plain ticket is the right choice if you know the collection, if you are travelling with children who will not sit through two hours of bronzes, or if you want to walk in at 8 am and have the Mycenaean gallery almost to yourself. The Headout entry ticket with audio guide costs about €26, is rated 4.6 from more than 1,400 reviews, lets you pick your entry time and stay as long as you like, and covers every permanent gallery. GetYourGuide sells two equivalent tickets at about €26 with an optional smartphone audio tour. None of the three can be cancelled or rescheduled once booked, so fix your dates first. The guided tour is the one museum-only product here with free cancellation, which is a second reason to prefer it if your dates are not yet fixed.

Tickets and prices

Prices below are a snapshot from September 2026 and can move by a few euros. The partner page shows the live figure before you pay. Every ticket, partner or desk, covers all the permanent collections on both floors. What the partner tickets add is an e-ticket, priority access at the entrance and an audio or live guide.

Ticket	Price	Includes
Private guided tour with entry (Headout)	from about €321 per group	2 hours with a licensed archaeologist, museum entry, price varies by group size. Free cancellation up to 48 hours before	Book
Private guided tour with entry (GetYourGuide)	about €196 per group of up to 6	2 hours with a licensed archaeologist, museum ticket. Free cancellation up to 24 hours before	Book
Entry ticket with audio guide (Headout)	about €26	Flexible entry time, all permanent galleries, app audio guide. Cannot be cancelled	Book
Entry ticket with multilingual audio guide (Headout)	about €30.60	Entry plus audio in six languages with offline maps. Cannot be cancelled	Book
Entry ticket with optional audio (GetYourGuide)	about €26	Entry for a chosen date, optional audio tours. Non-refundable	Book
Acropolis plus museum combo (Headout)	about €61.75	Timed Acropolis entry, museum entry, audio guides at both. Cannot be cancelled	Book

The museum's own page says the entrance fee stays the same throughout the year, so the winter half-price rule you may remember from older guides no longer applies here. Reduced admission at €10 is limited: EU senior citizens over 65 get it only from 1 October to 31 May, and the other reduced categories are parents and teachers escorting school visits. Free entry is wider than most visitors expect. EU citizens up to 25 pay nothing at any time, non-EU children up to 18 pay nothing, and so do visitors with a disability of 67 percent or more plus one escort, whatever their nationality, along with ICOM members, licensed guides and journalists with ID. Reduced and free categories are verified against ID or a passport on arrival. The partners do not sell them. If your party includes a 22-year-old from Dublin or a 16-year-old from Chicago, book National Archaeological Museum Athens tickets for the adults who pay full price and bring ID for the rest.

The free days are worth knowing even if you avoid them. The museum is free for everyone on 6 March, 18 April, 18 May, the last weekend of September (26 and 27 September in 2026) and 28 October, and on every first and third Sunday of the month from 1 November to 31 March. That first-and-third rule is more generous than the first-Sunday rule most people know, and it is the one to plan around on a winter city break. Free days are busier than paid days, as they always are, and the museum does not say by how much.

Opening hours and best time to visit

The National Archaeological Museum Athens has no weekly closing day, but it does have a weekly trap. Every Tuesday, in both seasons, the doors do not open until 13:00. In the summer season, which runs from 4 May to 15 November, the hours are Wednesday to Monday 8:00 to 20:00 and Tuesday 13:00 to 20:00, with last admission at 19:30. In the winter season, from mid-November to early May, they are Wednesday to Monday 8:30 to 15:30, last admission 15:00, and again Tuesday 13:00 to 20:00. Tuesday is therefore the one winter day with an evening opening and the one summer day with no morning. A Tuesday 10 am plan, in any season, means three hours in the cafe garden waiting for the doors.

Ticket sales end 30 minutes before closing and staff begin clearing the galleries 20 minutes before, so a winter afternoon visit really needs to start by 13:00 to be worth the ticket. The museum closes on 25 and 26 December, 1 January, 25 March, 1 May and Orthodox Easter Sunday. It also warns that individual galleries can close without notice for essential work, with no refund, which is one more argument for not leaving the visit to your last afternoon.

The quiet slot is the first hour after opening on a weekday, 8:00 in summer and 8:30 in winter. Headout's own private-tour page suggests 8 to 10 am for the same reason. The Mycenaean gallery is the first room off the lobby and fills first, so go there straight away and leave the sculpture circuit, which is long, for later. In summer the opening until 20:00 gives a second window: arrive at 17:00 and you still have three hours, which is enough for the route below. Booked ticket holders get priority access at the entrance, which the museum states in its own visit regulation. A booked ticket does not make the galleries emptier.

How long to allow: the museum publishes no figure. The guided tours run two hours and cover the essentials, and GetYourGuide's listing puts the average visit at two to three hours. Allow three if you want the Egyptian rooms and the upper floor as well as the headline pieces, and a full morning if you read labels.

Getting there

The National Archaeological Museum Athens address is 44 Patission Street (officially 28th of October Street), 10682 Athens, about 25 minutes on foot north of Syntagma Square by our estimate, up Panepistimiou and Patission. The museum names two metro stations: Victoria, roughly seven or eight minutes on foot, and Omonia, roughly ten to twelve. Trolleybuses 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 11, 13 and 14 stop outside on Patission, and a long list of city buses does too. There is no parking at the museum. The nearest private car parks are on Bouboulinas Street, Zaimi Street and Alexandras Avenue.

From the Acropolis it is about 2.5 kilometres, a 30 to 35 minute walk that nobody enjoys in July. Take the metro from Akropoli to Omonia instead and walk the last ten minutes. The nearest of our other museum pages is the Hellenic Motor Museum, about three minutes away by our estimate, which is a different afternoon altogether if you are travelling with someone who has had enough of marble. The Museum of Cycladic Art and the Benaki are both a walk of around 22 minutes to the south-east in Kolonaki, and the Numismatic Museum about 17 minutes, so a museum day on foot is possible if you start here early.

If you booked a guided tour, check the meeting point on your voucher. The GetYourGuide private tour meets on the steps in front of the main entrance at Patission 44. The Headout private tour asks you to be at the museum entrance 15 minutes before the start. The tour-only option of the small-group tour needs you there 20 minutes early with admission already covered.

What to see: highlights

The building is a neoclassical design by the architect L. Lange, finished by Ernst Ziller, founded in 1866 and inaugurated in 1889, and it is arranged by collection: Prehistoric, Sculpture, Vases and Minor Arts, Metalwork, and Egyptian and Near Eastern. Ground floor first, then upstairs. The room numbers below are the museum's own.

• Mask of Agamemnon, Room 4. The first gallery off the lobby holds the gold death masks from the shaft graves of Grave Circles A and B at Mycenae, 16th century BC, with the grave stelae at the entrance, the gold tableware, signet rings and inlaid daggers, the Linear B tablets and the Warrior Vase. The mask known as Agamemnon's comes from Grave V of Circle A. It is the reason most people buy National Archaeological Museum Athens tickets, and it is the room to see before the groups arrive.
• Cycladic harpist, Room 6. Two marble musicians from Keros, the harpist and the aulos player, stand at the entrance with the largest Cycladic female figure found so far and the folded-arm figurines from Naxos, Syros, Amorgos and Sifnos. Five thousand years old and still the most modern-looking objects in the building.
• Artemision Zeus or Poseidon, Room 15. An early Classical bronze lifted from the sea off Cape Artemision on Euboea, striding, arm back, and missing the object that would settle whether he threw a thunderbolt or a trident. The museum calls it one of the rarest bronze works to survive. The Eleusis relief is in the same room.
• Jockey of Artemision, Room 34. A Hellenistic bronze racehorse at full stretch with a boy rider, from the same stretch of sea, placed at the end of the sculpture circuit so that the walk through the kouroi, the stele of Hegeso and the Diadoumenos builds up to it.
• Antikythera Mechanism, Room 38. The bronze geared device from the Antikythera shipwreck, dated 150 to 100 BC, which the museum's brochure describes as the oldest surviving portable astronomical and calendrical mechanical computer. It is shown in the Metalwork collection with the other finds from the wreck, and it is small, so give it time.
• Egyptian collection, Rooms 40 and 41. Statues, stelae, sarcophagi, mummy cases, animal mummies and Fayum portraits from the Predynastic period to Roman Egypt, arranged by daily life, burial and religion, built on two donations from 1880 and 1904. The museum calls the collection notable worldwide, and it sits at the far end of the ground floor, so put it on the plan.
• Thera frescoes, Room 48, upper floor. The Spring Fresco with its lilies and sparrows, the Boxing Children and the Antelopes, wall paintings from Akrotiri on Thera buried by the volcanic eruption, shown with Linear A amphorae and the plaster cast of a wooden bed from the same settlement. Worth the stairs even after two hours downstairs.

Tips before you go

Bags first. Anything larger than 30 by 30 by 15 centimetres, and all luggage and rucksacks, must go into the cloakroom in the reception lobby after security screening. Coats, cash, documents and valuables cannot be left there, so carry a small bag for those. Hand-held photography without flash is allowed free of charge, tripods and filming are not, and a few objects carry a no-photography plate. Sketching in pencil, charcoal or pen on a pad up to 50 by 40 centimetres needs no permit, which is a nice touch in the sculpture rooms. No food or drink outside the cafe, phones on silent, no pets except guide dogs.

The step-free entrance is on the Vasileos Irakleiou Street side of the building, reached by a ramp from the main facade or straight from the pavement. Lifts serve the basement and the first floor, there is an accessible toilet in the basement, and a wheelchair can be borrowed at the information desk. Visitors with sight loss can ask for the list of 20 touchable exhibits in the Sculpture Collection. Pregnant women and anyone with reduced mobility get priority at the entrance. Free WiFi runs throughout the building.

The cafe and its garden patio are open to anyone without a ticket, which makes the museum a useful meeting point and a good place to wait out a Tuesday morning. The shop reopened under new management in August 2025 and keeps museum hours. In summer, the galleries are the sensible place for the hottest part of the day: do the Acropolis at opening, take the metro north and arrive here around noon with a booked entry time.

A simple plan: book the small-group tour for a weekday at opening time, or any day except Tuesday before noon, meet the guide at the entrance, let them take you through Rooms 4, 15 and 38, then stay on alone for the Jockey, the Egyptian rooms and the Thera frescoes upstairs before a coffee in the garden. If you are on the plain ticket, walk the same route in the same order and allow three hours.

How to book, in four steps

1. Pick guided or plain. First visit, or any interest in the Mycenaeans and the bronzes: the two-hour small-group National Archaeological Museum Athens tour from about €59 with entry. Repeat visit, children or a tight budget: the entry ticket with audio guide from about €26, which is the cheapest way to have the Mycenaean rooms explained. Four or more of you who want a guide to yourselves: the Headout private tour from about €321 per group.
2. Pick the slot. Weekday opening time, 8:00 in summer and 8:30 in winter, and never a Tuesday morning. In winter the last useful start is about 13:00. In summer the museum is open until 20:00 every day.
3. Book early with free cancellation where you can. The small-group tour cancels free up to 24 hours before and the Headout private tour up to 48 hours, so both can be booked as soon as you know the day. The plain partner tickets cannot be cancelled or rescheduled, so buy those only once your Athens dates are fixed.
4. Pair it with a neighbour. The Acropolis and its museum are the natural other half of the day by metro. The Hellenic Motor Museum is three minutes on foot for a change of century.

Nearby and combinations

The obvious pairing is the Acropolis. Headout's combination ticket at about €61.75 covers timed Acropolis entry and museum entry with audio guides at both, which is cheaper than the small-group museum tour alone and about 5 percent under its own list price. It cannot be cancelled. The larger combination at about €152.95 adds the multipass for the Acropolis and five other sites, the Ancient Agora, the Roman Agora, the Temple of Olympian Zeus, the Lykeion and the Panathenaic Stadium, for anyone spending three or four days on antiquities. For the museum across the road from the rock, see our Acropolis Museum tickets page. The two complement each other, the Acropolis Museum for one building's sculpture, this one for the rest of Greece.

If the museum is one of four or more stops in two or three days, look at the Athens City Pass. Only the GetYourGuide city pass, at about €79 for one to five days with free cancellation up to 24 hours, includes National Archaeological Museum entry alongside the Acropolis, the Acropolis Museum and the hop-on hop-off bus. Headout's MegaPass lists the Acropolis Museum as its museum and does not include this one, so do not buy it expecting to walk in here. For the rest of the city, our Best museums in Athens guide ranks the other collections and says which pair well in a day. The short answer for this neighbourhood is the Cycladic and the Benaki, both around 20 minutes on foot, both private, and both small enough to fit into the afternoon after a morning at the National Archaeological Museum Athens.