Greece Family Tours

Greece family tours are journeys that parents and children share across mainland Greece and its islands. The country holds a rich mix of wild animals, sea creatures and birds. Its residents include the little owl of Athena, the marginated tortoise, the Dalmatian pelican and the golden jackal. The white stork and Eleonora’s falcon breed there, while dolphins and sperm whales swim in nearby seas. Related trips include Greece island hopping tours, Corfu tours and Naxos tours. More trip ideas sit among the wider Greece tours.

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What are Greece family tours?

Greece family tours are trips for parents and children in a mostly mountainous land with a winding coast. A family is a group of parents and their children. Its natural homes for wildlife include hills, forests, rivers, lakes, coasts and farmland.

The climate of Greece ranges from Mediterranean through temperate to alpine. Temperate means mild, and alpine means cold and high. Greece family tours happen in a country where about 450 species of bird have been recorded. Each species is a separate kind of animal or plant. Greece is a meeting point for birds from three continents.

Larger meat-eating mammals in Greece include the European wildcat, the Balkan lynx and the grey wolf. A mammal is an animal that feeds its young on milk. Greece also holds ungulates, which are hoofed animals. Among them are the wild boar, red deer, fallow deer, roe deer and chamois. A chamois is a goat-like mountain animal.

About fifteen species of whales, dolphins and porpoises are reported in Greek waters. A porpoise is a close relative of the dolphin. About twenty species of bat also live in Greece. For Greece family tours, a bat is a mammal with wings of skin. Around 160 freshwater fish species were listed in Greek rivers in 2015.

• Birds of prey: Four vulture species are among the 36 daytime raptors recorded in the Dadia Forest.
• Hedgehogs: Greece is home to both the southern and the northern white-breasted hedgehog.
• Lampreys: Three lamprey species are found only in Greece, among them the Greek brook lamprey.

Greece family tours unfold in a land where the mainland covers about 80% of the territory. The largest mountain group on that mainland is the Pindus Range. It forms the spine of the country, and its highest peak rises to 2,637 metres.

Why does the little owl of Athena belong on Greece family tours?

Greece family tours are set in a land where the little owl ranges. This bird is also called the owl of Athena or the owl of Minerva. Its Latin group name, Athene, honours the Greek goddess Athena, because the owl stood for wisdom.

Its species name, noctua, is the Latin name of an owl sacred to Minerva. Minerva was the Roman match of Athena. A little owl holding an olive branch appears on a Greek tetradrachm coin from 500 BC. A tetradrachm was an ancient coin worth four drachmas, an old Greek unit of money. BC means before Christ.

A modern coin of Greece, the land of Greece family tours, carries a copy of that old design. A bronze statue from the 5th century BC shows Athena holding the bird in her hand. The little owl measures 22 cm long, and its open wings reach 56 cm from tip to tip.

White eyebrows give the adult little owl a stern look. The bird lives near ruins, quarries and rocky outcrops in open country. For Greece family tours, an outcrop is rock jutting up from the ground. The little owl is partly diurnal, a word for animals active in daylight. Its call is a complaining kiew, kiew.

• Nest: The little owl nests in holes, and about four eggs are laid in spring.
• Food: It feeds on insects, earthworms and small animals that have backbones.
• Voices: The little owl can recognise familiar birds by the sound of their voices.

The little owl has a life expectancy of about 16 years, the age it can live to. Europe holds between 560 thousand and 1.3 million breeding pairs. For Greece family tours, a breeding pair is a male and female raising young together.

Which Greek tales of the dolphin suit Greece family tours?

Greece family tours happen in the country whose language gave the dolphin its name. It stems from the old Greek delphís, which was related to delphus, meaning womb. The name can therefore be read as meaning a fish with a womb.

For Greece family tours, a womb is the part of a mother’s body where a baby grows. The name later passed into Latin as delphinus. The old term mereswine, meaning sea pig, is also used for the animal. In all, 40 living species of water mammal count as dolphins.

In Greek myths, dolphins were always seen as helpers of humankind. Greece family tours belong to a land where ancient coins show riders on dolphins. Each rider is a man, a boy or a god on the animal’s back. Dolphins were sacred to both Aphrodite and Apollo. Sacred means holy and set apart for a god.

The ancient Greeks saw dolphins riding in a ship’s wake as a good omen. The wake of a ship is the line of rippled water left behind it. An omen is a hint of what lies ahead. In a legend told by Pausanias, a dolphin carried Phalanthus safely to shore in Italy. Phalanthus was a figure of legend.

• Wall painting: A wall painting from Iklaina shows a ship with three human figures and dolphins.
• Common dolphin: The Mediterranean group of short-beaked common dolphins was judged endangered in 2003.
• Oceanic dolphins: Dolphins of the open ocean belong to the family called Delphinidae.

All dolphins belong to the toothed whales, a group that also includes porpoises and sperm whales. Toothed whales are simply whales that have teeth. For Greece family tours, the word cetacean names the wider group of whales, dolphins and porpoises.

How does the marginated tortoise of southern Greece fit Greece family tours?

Greece family tours unfold in a country whose south is the natural range of the marginated tortoise. The species is endemic to Greece, Italy and the Balkans. Endemic means found naturally in one region and nowhere else. It is the largest European tortoise.

The tortoise reaches a weight of up to 5 kg and a length of 35 cm. Its shell is oblong, and the saw-edged rear flares outward like a bell. Oblong describes a shape that stretches more in length than in width. The upper shell, called the carapace, is almost completely black with yellow highlights.

The marginated tortoise lives in more mountainous regions than Hermann’s tortoise. It is found as high as 1,600 metres. The black shell helps it soak up a great deal of heat in a short time. Early in the morning, these tortoises bask in the sun to warm their bodies. In Greece family tours, basking means lying in warm sunshine.

The tortoise is herbivorous, meaning a plant eater. It also brumates through the winter. For Greece family tours, brumation is a deep winter rest of reptiles, close to hibernation. The main subspecies, named first, is the Greek marginated tortoise. A subspecies is a regional variety within a species, with small differences.

• Peloponnese: A small, light-coloured population lives on the southwestern coast of the Peloponnese.
• Eggs: Female marginated tortoises lay hard-shelled, round eggs in the soil.
• Name: The name marginata comes straight from the Latin term for marginated, or edged.

The marginated tortoise is closely related to the Greek or common tortoise. Both share large scales on the front legs. Marginated tortoises are calm and relaxed, though they can be territorial in the wild. For Greece family tours, territorial means ready to defend a home area.

What makes the curly-headed Dalmatian pelican part of Greece family tours?

Greece family tours run in a country that shares the largest known breeding colony of Dalmatian pelicans. That colony, on a lake shared by Greece and Albania, holds around 1,600 pairs. The bird is the biggest of all pelicans.

A colony here means birds nesting close together in one spot. The Dalmatian pelican is also called the curly-headed pelican. Its Latin species name, crispus, means curly. A shaggy crest of curly feathers on the back of its head gives it an untidy look. A crest is a tuft of feathers on a bird’s head.

From wingtip to wingtip it spans 2.7 to 3.2 metres. That places it among the largest soaring birds. Wingtips are the outer ends of the wings. Its average weight is about 9.5 kg. For Greece family tours, pelicans that nest in Greece also forage, or hunt for food, in North Macedonia.

Carl Friedrich Bruch described the species in 1832, using an adult female from Dalmatia. Its nests are crude heaps of plants, set on islands or on dense mats of greenery. In flight, the pelican pulls its neck back in an S shape, like a heron. In Greece family tours, a heron is a long-legged wading bird.

• Legs: The legs are dark grey, which helps separate it from pink-legged relatives.
• World numbers: The world population is estimated at between 10,000 and 20,000 birds.
• Food: Its diet is mainly fish, and the males are larger than the females.

Russia now holds the largest breeding population, about 70 percent of all breeding birds worldwide. The Dalmatian pelican is a partial migrant. For Greece family tours, a partial migrant is a bird whose groups do not all migrate. To migrate is to travel between summer and winter homes.

Which Greek words name the sperm whale for Greece family tours?

Greece family tours belong to a country with a long coastline on the Mediterranean Sea. The sperm whale lives in that sea, but not in the Black Sea. It is the largest toothed whale and the largest toothed predator.

The first part of its Latin name, Physeter, comes from the Greek physētēr, meaning blowpipe or blowhole. For Greece family tours, a blowhole is the breathing hole on a whale’s head. The second part, macrocephalus, comes from the Greek makroképhalos, meaning big-headed. Another name, catodon, means down-tooth, because it shows teeth only in its lower jaw.

Mature males average 16 metres long, with the head up to one-third of the length. The whale plunges to 2,250 metres and ranks as the third deepest diving mammal. Only the southern elephant seal and Cuvier’s beaked whale dive deeper. Its brain is the largest on Earth, weighing over five times as much as a human brain.

The sperm whale uses echolocation and calls as loud as 236 decibels underwater, the loudest of any animal. Echolocation means sensing objects by the echoes of the animal’s own sounds. For Greece family tours, a decibel is a unit of loudness. Its head is filled with a waxy substance called spermaceti, which gave the whale its name.

• Newborns: Newborn sperm whales measure between 3.5 and 4.5 metres long.
• Flukes: The tail lobes, called flukes, are triangular and very thick.
• Feeding dive: The whale lifts its flukes high out of the water as it begins a feeding dive.

Spermaceti was a prime target of the whaling industry, used in oil lamps, lubricants and candles. An agreement on the conservation of cetaceans in the Mediterranean Sea also covers the species. For Greece family tours, conservation means protecting wild animals and their homes.

What story do Greek fossils tell about the golden jackal for Greece family tours?

Greece family tours are held in the country where the oldest golden jackal fossils in Europe were found. Those fossils are 7,000 years old. The golden jackal, or common jackal, is a wolf-like wild dog native to Eurasia.

Eurasia means Europe and Asia taken together. A fossil is the hardened trace of a plant or animal from the deep past. Genetic data suggest an ancient past for the golden jackals of the Peloponnese, in Greece. With jackals of Croatia’s Dalmatian coast, they possibly represent two European groups from 6,000 years ago.

The coat changes from a pale creamy yellow in summer to a dark tawny beige in winter. For Greece family tours, tawny means a warm, sandy brown colour. Despite its name, it is not closely related to the black-backed jackal of Africa. It is instead closer to wolves and coyotes. Males weigh between 6 and 14 kg.

Its omnivorous diet lets it eat a large range of foods. Omnivorous means eating both plants and animals. The breeding pair is the basic social unit, and golden jackals are monogamous. For Greece family tours, monogamous means keeping one partner for life. The pair is sometimes joined by its current litter, the pups born together.

• Howl: The howl is a wail repeated three or four times, rising in pitch, then three short yelps.
• Posture: Adult jackals howl standing, while young or lower-ranking jackals howl sitting.
• Bells: Adult golden jackals sometimes howl along with the ringing of church bells.

The ancestor of the golden jackal is believed to be the extinct Arno river dog. That small, jackal-like animal lived in southern Europe 1.9 million years ago. For Greece family tours, extinct means died out for good. There are six subspecies of the golden jackal.

Which old Greek law links the white stork to Greece family tours?

Greece family tours operate in a country where a census counted 2,139 pairs of white storks. A census is an official count. A Greek law called Pelargonia took its name from pelargos, the Ancient Greek word for stork.

The Pelargonia law required citizens to take care of their aged parents. Greek and Roman myths show storks as models of devotion to parents. For Greece family tours, devotion means deep, loyal care. To the Greeks, killing a stork carried the penalty of death. Storks were said to be protected in Ancient Thessaly because they hunted snakes.

In one myth, the goddess Hera turned the Trojan princess Antigone into a white stork. Aesop’s Fables feature the bird at least three times, as in The Fox and the Stork. For Greece family tours, a fable is a short tale with a lesson. Roman writers noted the stork’s spring arrival, a signal for farmers to plant vines.

Adult white storks have long red legs and long, pointed red beaks. The main sound of adults is bill-clattering, made by opening and closing the beak fast. When migrating, the white stork avoids crossing the Mediterranean. It soars on rising warm air, called thermals, which do not form over water.

• Nest guests: House sparrows, tree sparrows and common starlings regularly nest within the large nests of white storks.
• Calm birds: Storks have little fear of humans, provided they are not disturbed.
• Status: The International Union for Conservation of Nature rates the white stork as least concern.

According to European folklore, the stork brings babies to new parents. The legend is very ancient. Hans Christian Andersen made it popular in a 19th-century story called The Storks. For Greece family tours, folklore means the traditional beliefs and tales of a people.

Where does Eleonora’s falcon fit into Greece family tours?

Greece family tours run in the country where two-thirds of the world’s Eleonora’s falcons breed. Tilos, an island of the Dodecanese, holds 10 percent of the world population. Research counted 650 breeding pairs on that island.

For Greece family tours, the Dodecanese is an island chain of Greece in the southeast Aegean Sea. Eleonora’s falcon is a medium-sized falcon of the hobby group, a set of similar falcons. The sooty falcon is sometimes considered its closest relative. North of its range, the falcon is a rare vagrant, or stray.

Eleonora’s falcon comes in two colour morphs, or forms. The adult dark morph is sooty brown all over, with black underwing coverts. For Greece family tours, underwing coverts are the feathers that cover the underside of the wings. The light morph has buff underparts, and buff means a pale yellowish brown. Its call is a typical falcon kek-kek-kek.

The falcon catches big insects like dragonflies and eats them while flying. It passes each insect from its talons to its beak first. Talons are the sharp claws of a bird of prey. It belongs to a small number of falcon species that form breeding colonies. A female lays up to four eggs.

• Other colonies: The species also breeds in Cyprus, the Canary Islands, Ibiza and off Spain, Italy and Croatia.
• Route: Satellite tracking showed an inland migration route through the Sahara Desert.
• Bats: Eleonora’s falcon has also been observed feeding on bats at times.

Eleonora’s falcon captures small birds in flight with speed and aerobatic skill. For Greece family tours, aerobatic means skilled at stunts in the air. The falcons cruise along coastal cliffs, watching for tired incoming migrants. Those migrants are birds on long seasonal journeys.

Why do Greece family tours in Macedonia point to Platamon Castle?

Greece family tours explore a country where Platamon Castle crowns a hill settled since the Bronze Age. That age takes its name from bronze, the metal of its tools. Thick walls and towers made a castle hard for enemies to take.

Around 360 BC, a writer named Skylax called the place the first Macedonian city past the river Peneios. BC counts the years before the start of the Christian calendar. In 430 BC, Athenian forces took the place to control the Thermaic Gulf. The word gulf names a wide arm of the sea reaching inland.

For families on Greece family tours, the castle’s written record starts in the 12th century. Texts from that time first name the castle itself. In 1425, Venetian forces briefly captured it from the Ottomans. Venice was a sea power based in Italy. The Ottomans ruled a large empire centred on what is now Turkey.

As context for Greece family tours, the castle has only a fairly narrow gate. Its builders chose this for strategic reasons, since a narrow gate is easy to defend. Strategic means planned to gain an advantage in a conflict. To defend a place is to protect it from attack. A gate is an entrance through a wall.

• Daily life: Remains of churches, houses, pottery and a smithy, a metal workshop, show past daily life.
• Pirates: Cannons, partly well preserved, defended the fortress against pirates in the later Middle Ages.
• Railway tunnel: Railway tunnel work through the hill uncovered building outlines from the ancient city of Herakleion.

A second, lower wall once ringed the whole complex. For Greece family tours, it is the outer layer of the castle’s defence. In an emergency, this wall formed the first line of defence. An emergency is a sudden, dangerous event that calls for quick action.

Which three games make up tavli for Greece family tours?

Greece family tours run through a country where tavli leads among board games of the tables family. English speakers sometimes call it Greek backgammon. A board game is played by moving pieces on a marked board. Tavli also leads across the Balkans and West Asia.

Tables games form an old family of race games, and backgammon is the best known modern one. In a race game, each player hurries pieces around a board to reach the end. As context for Greece family tours, a tavli match joins three such games for two players. Their names are Portes, Plakoto and Fevga.

For Greece family tours, the three games run in a repeating cycle. Play ends once a player reaches the agreed target score, set at five or seven points. Each game goes to whoever first bears off all 15 pieces. Bearing off means lifting pieces off the board at the finish.

Plakoto, the second game, works by pinning. A player traps a single rival piece by covering it with one of their own. The trapped piece cannot move until the covering piece leaves. To pin something is to hold it fast so that it stays in place. A rival is the player on the other side.

• The mother: In Plakoto, the final piece still on the starting point carries the name mother.
• Fevga: The third game is a running game, with no hitting and no pinning allowed.
• Portes: The first game, Portes, stays closest to backgammon of the three.

In a number of countries, tavli and its variants count as a national board game. Greece family tours span one of the lands where this game is played. A variant is a version of a game with its own rules.

How does the National Garden of Athens fit into Greece family tours?

Greece family tours reach Athens, where the National Garden spreads between the districts of Kolonaki and Pangrati. It sits right behind the building of the Greek Parliament. A district is one named part of a city. Parliament is the elected assembly that passes the nation’s laws.

Athens’ dry Mediterranean weather was too harsh for a large share of the imported plants, and they died. Part of the upper garden lay behind the Old Palace. It was fenced off as a private refuge for the king and queen. A refuge is a quiet, safe place to rest.

As context for Greece family tours, the park opened to all in the 1920s as the National Garden. In honour of Queen Amalia, the main gate was shifted to the 12 palms she had planted. Palms are tall trees with a crown of large leaves. An entrance is the main way into a place.

In 2004, the Greek state passed the garden to the Athens city authority for a 90-year term. The state here means the national government of Greece. On the south side stand busts of two famous Greek poets, Dionysios Solomos and Aristotelis Valaoritis. Solomos wrote the Greek National Anthem. A bust is a carved likeness of the head and shoulders.

• Roman ruins: The great bulk of ancient ruins inside the garden are Roman, including a villa with a mosaic.
• Gates: Besides the main entrance on Amalias Avenue, three more gates lead into the garden.
• Plant experts: Botanists such as Theodor von Heldreich, Spyridon Miliarakis and Karl Nikolas Fraas also helped run it.

For Greece family tours with children, the garden holds a Children’s Library and a playground. A library is a room of books to read or borrow. A playground is an outdoor space with swings and slides. Greece family tours share Athens with this green space.

What links knucklebones, an ancient toy, to Greece family tours?

Greece family tours cross the land that gave knucklebones its name. The Ancient Greek game used the astragalus of a sheep, a small bone in the ankle. Knucklebones is a game of hand skill, in which players toss up small objects and catch them.

The game was widely loved in ancient Greece and Rome. Children and adults both played it. The historian Herodotus wrote that knucklebones was famous in Athens. He also claimed it was not native to the city. Native means first born or made in a place. He tells this in his book The Histories.

For Greece family tours, the game comes with a legend. The playwright Sophocles credited it to Palamedes, a figure from Greek myth. Palamedes supposedly taught it to his fellow Greeks during the Trojan War. A playwright is a writer of plays. The Trojan War is the legendary Greek war against the city of Troy.

On Greece family tours, a school detail comes from an epigram by Asclepiodotus. It records that astragali were handed to schoolchildren as prizes. An epigram is a short, clever poem. Astragali is the plural of astragalus, the ankle bone. The simple toss-and-catch game was called penta litha, which means five stones.

• Scoring: In the chance game, four pastern bones were thrown, giving 35 possible scores in one throw.
• Top throw: In Greece, the best throw scored 40 points and was named the Euripides.
• Named throws: Throws with their own names included Aphrodite, Midas, Solon and Alexander.

As context for Greece family tours, knucklebones are believed to be an early forerunner of dice. A forerunner is an earlier form that leads to a later one. Dice are small cubes with marked sides, thrown to give a number.

Why does NOESIS, a science museum near Thessaloniki, matter to Greece family tours?

Greece family tours reach Thessaloniki, where NOESIS stands in Thermi, on the outskirts of the city. It is a museum of science and technology. Technology means tools and machines that people build using science. The outskirts are the outer edges of a city.

For families on Greece family tours, the museum works to protect the Greek technological heritage. Heritage means the skills and objects passed down from the past. Beyond its exhibits, it has a planetarium, an amphitheatre, a simulation room and a wide-screen cinema. A planetarium shows the stars and planets on a domed ceiling.

The museum’s story starts in November 1978. It began then as an association called the Technical Museum of Thessaloniki. An association is a group of people joined for a shared aim. Its first home was a space of 500 square metres in western Thessaloniki. A square metre measures one metre on each side.

The museum then moved to a larger space of 1,500 square metres in Sindos. As of 2001, a new foundation took over and moved to Thermi. There it fills a building complex of 14,000 square metres. A foundation is a body set up to run a public cause. A complex is a group of linked buildings.

• Building shape: The design evokes Archimedes’ wedge, with the main block as a lever lifting a sphere.
• Old cars: For Greece family tours, a transport hall displays a number of vintage cars.
• Ancient machines: Modern copies of ancient Greek technology share space with a display of antique cameras.

As context for Greece family tours, the museum won a special mention in 2017 for welcoming refugee families. It gave them learning and social programmes. Refugees are people who have had to flee their home country. A special mention is an honour given beside the main prizes.

What does the Aquarium of Rhodes hold for Greece family tours?

Greece family tours reach the island of Rhodes, home to the Aquarium of Rhodes. It works as a research centre, an aquarium and a museum. An aquarium is a building with glass tanks where sea creatures live. Research means careful study to find new facts.

For families on Greece family tours, the building dates from the 1930s, when Rhodes was under Italian rule. It opened in 1937 as the Royal Biological Research Institute of Rhodes. Biology is the study of living things. Early research there covered sponges, Aegean fisheries and hydrology, the study of water.

Since 1963, the building has carried the name Hydrobiological Station of Rhodes. Hydrobiology is the study of life in water. For Greece family tours, the aquarium itself sits in the basement. The corridor there is shaped to look like a cave beneath the sea. A basement is the floor of a building below ground level.

Tanks along both sides of the corridor hold about 80,000 litres of filtered seawater. Filtered means cleaned by passing through a fine screen. A separate freshwater tank houses the Rhodes minnow, a threatened fish endemic to Rhodes. Endemic means found in one place and nowhere else. Freshwater is water without salt.

• Old skeleton: A 2000-year-old skeleton of a Mediterranean monk seal came from a grave at the port.
• Animal care: A separate holding area cares for sea turtles and seals injured near the island.
• Local finds: Museum displays of octopuses, crabs, sharks and sea urchins all come from Rhodes and nearby islands.

Greece family tours reach an island where this building gained an exhibition area in 1971 and 1972. The new space stands on its north side. An exhibition is a public show of objects for people to study and enjoy.

Why is polis, an ancient board game, part of the story of Greece family tours?

Greece family tours explore the land of polis, an ancient Greek board game also called petteia. Its original rules survive only in part. What remains resembles checkers, also called draughts. Checkers is a game where pieces jump across a squared board to capture rivals.

The name polis appears in Greek writing from around 450 BC to the 2nd century BC. The game seems to have been widely known, above all in Athens. The earliest known mention comes from Cratinos, an Athenian comic poet. A comic poet wrote funny plays in verse. Polis is the Greek word for a city-state.

For Greece family tours, a polis piece was captured when rivals enclosed it from two sides. The pieces were called dogs and came in two colours. Each side is thought to have had thirty, though this number is disputed. To enclose means to close in around something. Captured pieces left the board.

Good strategy meant keeping pieces in formation and avoiding isolated ones. A formation is an ordered group that moves together. Isolated means cut off and alone. As context for Greece family tours, ancient Greeks saw educational value in the game. It trained players to learn and follow a set of rules. Educational means helping people learn.

• War on a grid: Scholar Max Nelson called it the first known war game played on a grid board.
• Praise: The writers Plato and Polybius praised it as a strategy game needing great tactical skill.
• The board: Julius Pollux recorded that the board shared the name polis and carried a grid.

Greece family tours span the land of polis, and scholar Leslie Kurke saw a deeper role for it. She argued that the game shaped a Greek boy into a citizen of the city. A citizen is a full member of a city or a country.

Which past lies behind the Castle of Mytilene for Greece family tours?

Greece family tours span a country whose island of Lesbos holds the Castle of Mytilene. It ranks among the largest castles in the Mediterranean, at 60 acres. Its hill rises between the northern harbour and the southern harbour. An acre is a unit of land area.

The first castle on the hill possibly dates from the reign of Justinian I, between 527 and 565. Justinian I was a Byzantine, or eastern Roman, emperor. In 1501, Sultan Bayezid II repaired war damage to the castle. He also built two large round towers fitted with cannon. Sultan was the title of the Ottoman ruler.

In 1643 and 1644, Bekir Pasha led works to modernise the castle. In front of the new walls, builders dug a deep, wide moat. A moat is a ditch that guards a castle. As context for Greece family tours, Admiral Kuramadji added a polygonal, or multi-sided, tower in 1756. It stands near the harbour of Epano Skala.

Greece captured the island on 8 November 1912, in the First Balkan War. The Balkans lie in the south-east of Europe. Captured means taken by force. For Greece family tours, the castle splits into an Upper, a Middle and a Lower Castle. The Upper Castle, or acropolis, is the highest point of the hill.

• Bathhouse: The Lower Castle, added by the Ottomans in 1644, holds a hammam, or bathhouse.
• Recycled stone: Builders took materials from the Ancient Theatre of Mytilene during the works of 1677.
• Summer events: Today the castle hosts local festivals in summer and holds status as a historical site.

For Greece family tours, one tower in the Upper Castle carries a royal name: the Queen’s Tower. This square stone tower carries the family crests of the Gattilusi and Palaiologoi. A crest is a family’s painted or carved badge.

What do travellers ask about Greece family tours, and what are the answers?

Greece family tours reach Athens, where Pedion tou Areos ranks among the largest public parks. Its name means Field of Ares, the war god. Planners designed it in 1934 to honour heroes of the Greek uprising of 1821. It holds a playground and an open theatre.

Before Greece family tours, what is episkyros?

Episkyros was a ball game of ancient Greece. Two teams of 12 to 14 players each took part. A team is a group of players who work together on one side. The Romans later adopted the game, changed it and renamed it harpastum. Adopted means taken up and used as one’s own.

For Greece family tours, what is egg tapping, or tsougrisma?

Egg tapping is a traditional Easter game played with two hard-boiled eggs. Players knock the ends of the eggs together. Each player taps a rival’s egg and tries to crack it without cracking their own. Greeks call the custom tsougrisma, which means to clink together. Hard-boiled means cooked in boiling water until solid.

Ahead of Greece family tours, what was hoop rolling in ancient Greece?

Hoop rolling means driving a hoop along the ground with a stick. Ancient Greeks called the hoop the trochus. Hoops were thought to be made of bronze, iron or copper. Players drove them with a stick called the elater. The doctor Hippocrates recommended the sport for strengthening weak bodies.

When planning Greece family tours, what was the Five Lines game?

Five Lines, or pente grammai, is the modern name of an old Greek board game. Its boards had five parallel lines. A number of them were cut straight into temple floors. The earliest known boards, from Anagyros in Attica, date to the 7th century BCE. BCE labels years that fall before the Common Era.