British Pathé, the world’s leading multimedia resource, has released a short documentary film showing Athens of 1961 and invites us all to take a trip back in time.

“From a very modern innovation to great architecture inspired by the culture of ancient Greece,” the narrator says at the start of the video as a young woman tours the Acropolis. “These steps that tourists now tread, felt the feet of Gods, for this is the Acropolis – offered to the Gods by devoted Athenians before the world was one,” the narrator continues while we watch the Parthenon of Pericles, the Caryatids, a ruined temple and statue columns.

The narrator refers to the “magnificent columns” created by Greeks of the Golden Age, although the Acropolis is now “cracked, crumbling and slightly shifted”.

“Today the tourists come, but the Gods are immortalized, as time has immortalized their earthly home,” the narrator refers as the video shifts to Athens old airport at Elliniko.

However, the narrator says that despite the history that Athens carries through centuries, it is also a modern city.

“The world is a world of the present, drawing strength from the past and looking towards the future. Athens is equal to the world in this respect. She is very much a great modern city too.”

From the airport we are driven to the busy city center of Athens, where “Modern Athens, like any capital city, has its eye-catching hotels, department stores and its street traffic system, straining to control the constant flow of cars from all over the world.”

While showing Plaka, the narrator notices that there is always something different around each corner: “A maze of streets that ends with the romance of old Greece.”

The footage shows tourists buying souvenirs and the narrator comments that tourists flock to Athens for the variety they can find there.

Source: news.gtp.gr