Cathedral of St Dionysius, Athens

Cathedral of St Dionysius, Athens tickets: which one to buy

The Catholic cathedral of Athens stands on Panepistimiou avenue, a wide nineteenth-century street between Syntagma square and Omonia, and is free to enter. It is not on the standard tourist route, which runs south towards the Acropolis, and that is precisely why it is worth the ten-minute detour. Architecture tours of modern Athens include it with the neoclassical trilogy of the academy, the university and the library a few hundred metres further along, all products of the same Bavarian-influenced decades after independence.

Walking tours of the centre generally pass by. Services are held in Greek, English, French and other languages for a congregation that is largely made up of foreign residents and recent immigrants, and the English mass is well attended. Nothing needs booking. Note that the Orthodox cathedral, which most people mean when they say Athens cathedral, is a different building several streets south. Sunday mass times are posted at the gate and change between the summer and winter timetables.

Visiting Cathedral of St Dionysius, Athens: what to see

A Latin archdiocese existed in Athens from 1205, when crusaders took the city and turned the Parthenon into a cathedral, but nothing survives of the churches it used. The present building belongs to the new Greek state: designed in neo-Renaissance style with a connection to Leo von Klenze, the Bavarian architect who shaped Munich and advised on the planning of the new Athens, it was built through the middle decades of the nineteenth century and finished in 1865.

The front is a restrained arcaded basilica face in pale stone, set back behind a small forecourt with palms, and it reads as a piece of Munich transplanted. Inside it is a wide three-aisled basilica with a coffered ceiling, marble columns and considerably more light than an Orthodox church of the same date would have. It is dedicated to the Athenian converted by Paul on the Areopagus, which is the rock below the Acropolis, and the dedication is deliberate. A separate chapel off the south aisle serves the Catholic communities of the Middle East and keeps its own iconography.

Cathedral of St Dionysius, Athens opening hours and the best time to go

The church is open through the day, with a break in the early afternoon in summer. Athens in July and August is extremely hot and this part of the centre has little shade, so morning or early evening is the sensible time. Easter here follows the Orthodox calendar for the country at large, but the Catholic parish keeps the Western date, which means the city's two Easters usually fall on different Sundays and this cathedral is busy when everything else is normal.

Christmas services draw the diplomatic community. The avenue outside is a route for demonstrations and marches, which can close it at short notice. The national archaeological museum is fifteen minutes north on foot, the Acropolis twenty minutes south, and the arcaded shopping streets around the church are good for a coffee. Twenty minutes inside is enough. The metro station at Panepistimio is directly outside and links the church to both the Acropolis and the port road.