The citadel that named an age.

Mycenae gave its name to an entire civilisation — the Bronze Age culture that dominated the Greek mainland from roughly the sixteenth to the twelfth century BC, and the seat, in legend, of King Agamemnon.

You enter through the Lion Gate, the monumental relief that has guarded the citadel for more than three thousand years, set into ramparts so massive that later Greeks believed only the one-eyed Cyclopes could have raised them.

Within the walls lie the royal shaft graves where Heinrich Schliemann uncovered the golden burial goods now in Athens — among them the funerary mask he famously, if mistakenly, called the Mask of Agamemnon. Just outside the citadel stands the Treasury of Atreus, the most perfect of the great beehive tombs.

A UNESCO World Heritage Site and one of the defining places of the ancient world, Mycenae is about an hour and a quarter from the villa by car — Homer’s "well-built citadel, rich in gold," still commanding its hill above the Argive plain, and a natural morning before lunch in Nafplio.

← Back to Costa Phos