“The Acropolis bears witness to the incredible achievements of ancient Greek civilization and their timeless legacy,” Ivanka Trump wrote on her Instagram account yesterday, under a series of photos with the Acropolis in the background. Donald Trump’s daughter visited the Sacred Rock with her husband Jared Kushner and they joined the thousands of famous and lesser-known visitors who really packed the ecumenical monument this year.

According to the traffic data provided by K, the month of April is closed to the Acropolis and the traffic is approaching August 2019, averaging between 16,000 and 17,000 visitors per day. Even for the Holy Rock, which is a pole of attraction for visitors from all over the world, these figures cause smiles, but also a headache for the Ministry of Culture, since it is estimated that traffic will be many times higher in August 2023.

Tourist traffic is expected to explode across the country as many foreign airlines from Kazakhstan to Seoul dock with Athens (“K”, 05/30/2023) and Aegean will have the largest flight schedule in its history this summer. Add to this cruise ships with tourists disembarking at the port of Piraeus and heading to the center of the capital and to the Acropolis, and you have a picture of this summer in the capital.

The congestion of visitors is expected to create the familiar queues at the entrance to the Propylaea. This is an age-old problem, which is mainly associated with the collection of large tourist groups in the morning, and not with their dispersal during the day. Individual visitors, families and small groups of tourists line up with them. Lines have noticeably shrunk during the pandemic years, but this year tourism has rebounded and large groups are showing up much earlier.

The plan is in the final stages of development and is likely to be implemented in June.

Managing a large flow of visitors is not an easy task, as the morphology of the Acropolis and the current site configuration allow for a single visitor entrance, resulting in overcrowding. According to K, in order to combat this phenomenon, the Organization for the Management and Development of Cultural Resources of the Ministry of Culture intends to introduce “visiting zones” for individual visitors from this summer on a pilot basis.

The YPPOA plan is in the final stages of development and will most likely be implemented in June so that it can be tested on individual visitors and then implemented on large groups. The traffic zones will be displayed when issuing an e-ticket, and visitors will “close” their visit for a certain period of time (whether it will be one or two hours remains to be determined) and view the Acropolis. The effectiveness of the measure will be evaluated by the ODAP services and, if necessary, measures will be taken to improve it so that later – apparently from the next tourist season – it can be extended to organized groups of tourists.

It would be desirable to introduce visitor areas, as is done in major monuments internationally, so that there is a distribution of visitors throughout the day, and to create a new visitor culture so that those who travel from afar to experience the Acropolis are also those who are on it works.