‘Theseus should have WhatsApped’: my family’s journey into Percy Jackson’s ancient world

The ancient Odeon of Herodes Atticus is under the protection of Athena, Dionysus, Zeus and Elton John. The first three – in their respective roles as the patron deities of Athens, drama and the whole Hellenic world – have been looking after this still-spectacular theatre at the foot of the Acropolis since it was built in AD 161; Elton (in his role as god of funny specs?) has been doing his bit, along with Placido Domingo, Sting and others, by playing concerts there since 2000. Millennia-old, marble-made, open-air theatres need a bit of upkeep apparently, so the money raised comes in handy; Zeus, for all his “patronage”, seems to have misplaced his chequebook this last couple of thousand years.

If that mixture of the ancient, divine and Rocket Man modern disturbs you, then you will probably have been avoiding the television show of the moment: Percy Jackson and the Olympians – the Croesus-budgeted Disney+ adaptation of the squillion-selling children’s books by Rick Riordan – which concludes its first season tonight. In it, 12-year-old New Yorker Percy (short for Perseus) finds he’s the son of Poseidon, fights a minotaur, retrieves the golden fleece and… actually, if I’m honest, I stopped listening to my nine-year-old’s constant explanations of the plots somewhere after the first few months of his obsession. But I would, I agreed, take him and his almost-equally-keen 11-year-old brother to Crete (birthplace of Zeus, home of the original Minotaur) and Athens (birthplace of Dionysus, home of some excellent seafood restaurants; well who says it has to be all about the kids?).

Television show of the moment Percy Jackson and the Olympians concludes its first season tonight – Television Stills/Disney

Worried that their enthusiasm for Greek mythology might melt like Icarus’s wings once confronted with a load of old stones and a bunch of museums, I start things off with a child-friendly Percy Jackson-themed tour from a company that specialises in them (greekmythologytours.com). Despite her degree in ancient Greek and archaeology, our guide Eva is anything but a dusty purist: she draws my boys in with her television-presenter energy levels and a real enthusiasm for the books (their version of the gods and goddesses, she tells me out of earshot, are “very little changed from the original stories – they just say ‘dating’ instead of ‘rape’”).

She also brings an iPad for each child, loaded with augmented-reality software that overlays interactive elements to whatever they point its camera at. But no such modern-day magic is necessary: as our group reaches the high plateau of the Acropolis through its colossal, god-sized Propylaea gateways, every eye widens and every hair stands on end at least a little.

The Acropolis of Athens was a highlight for the family – Moment/Getty

The incidental music in our heads swells stirringly, then there’s a cinematic moment any director would be proud of, the October half-term sun slicing through between the columns of the roofless Parthenon.

Even the children gasp slightly at this first sight – I don’t know if it’s the age of it, the stories woven round it or the pure aesthetics, some timeless algebra of perfect proportion – and then (another classic trick from the cinematographer’s handbook) we get to tell them that that’s just the back door they’re looking at, and we pan round to the great front portico.

Eva blows minds a little further with a description of the 40ft gold-and-ivory statue of Athena that once stood here, gracefully waves away our very British grimacey half-smiles of rueful apology when discussing those missing marbles, and points us to the most tween-pleasing bits in the Acropolis Museum (an ancient eight-man public latrine, and the comic book punch of the Centauromachy friezes – all bulging marble muscles and weapons crunching graphically into flesh).

Plaster replicas of The Elgin Marbles on display in the Acropolis Museum in Athens – Jamie Lorriman

Next day, we squeeze in a few thousand years more: the magisterial Temple of Olympian Zeus (which took 600 years to build), Temple of Hephaestus (its interior and altar still imagination-firingly intact), and Panathenaic Stadium, where the original Olympians competed, naked, in athletics. (“What do you think the winner’s prize was?”, I asked my boys, having just learned that it was an amphora of olive oil. “Clothes?” guessed the 11-year-old.)

The Temple of Olympian Zeus took 600 years to build – Popperfoto/Getty

He’s similarly nonplussed at Sounion, a few miles outside Athens, and site of Aegeus’s suicide when his son Theseus returned from slaying the minotaur but forgot to hoist the white sails that would have indicated victory. We both take a lesson from the tale, but while mine is “Sons should listen to what their fathers tell them”, I fear his is “Theseus should have WhatsApped”.

The family visited Panathenaic Stadium, where the original Olympians competed – Ed Grenby

The Panathenaic Stadium in Athens during the opening ceremony of the 1906 Olympic Games – Getty

Once the sun starts to sink, though, it’s impossible not to feel the numinous magic of the place. The honey-toned Pentelic marble of Poseidon’s temple seems to soak up the sky’s rose glow, paling with the sunset through amber and peach before settling into translucent moonlight-white. At the foot of those deadly cliffs lies the Aegean itself, a glittering infinity of blue, the first islands beckoning from the misty distance – and we heed their siren song (and that of the all-day ice cream parlour) by heading off to Crete next day, and the Cretan Malia Park resort.

This was supposed to be the kiddie-pleasing, sun-sea-and-pizza-at-the-hotel-buffet part of the holiday. (In Athens we’d stayed at the sophisticated New Hotel in the buzzing Plaka district.) But in fact the Cretan Malia pulls off all that family-friendly stuff while still feeling like a lovely little Greek island village. Rooms, pools and restaurants are scattered around Homerically lovely gardens that spread down to a demerara-sugar beach, and the air is scented with oleander, tamarisk and pomegranate trees. We paddle-board in temple-calm waters; I get a massage with fig-and-olive-oil massage oil that leaves me smelling so good I only narrowly resist licking my arms; and we feast like Dionysus himself at every mealtime – home-made thyme-infused honey and yoghurt for breakfast, garlicky-herby lamb roasted slowly over an open fire for dinner.

The second part of their Ancient Greek adventure took the family to Crete – Alamy

I love the laid back bar and authentic-feel restaurants; my boys swoon for movie nights and milk-shakes at the hammock-strung open-air cinema. But not every child is so fortunate. With the help of another brilliant specialist operator (kidslovegreece.com), we make the 40-minute drive to the Cave of Zeus one day: supposed birthplace and nursery of the father of the gods, a soft-play area it ain’t. Down a staircase of Orphean length and steepness is a full-on Hades of thunderingly grandiose power-rock pillars where stalactites meet stalagmites to make a natural version of a temple’s columns, mighty enough to hold up the roof of the Earth itself.

Stalactites grow at just 1 centimetre a century, explains our guide, and with some of those here a good 20 metres tall, they easily predate humans. The nine-year-old’s jaw slackens visibly.

A local mini-myth insists that Crete’s ubiquitous soundtrack of tinkling goat-bells was created to hide Baby Zeus’s location from his father, who wanted to kill him (we’ve all been there, right, dads?). Which seems quaint until our guide leads us down the Gorge of Saints next day, where the high walls of a dry valley amplify the ringing till it’s borderline deafening. We hike, we rock-climb, we abseil, we poke our noses into a tiny 14th-century church where the air is heavy with incense and the presence of those sad-eyed Greek Orthodox icons – then suddenly the gorge opens out into widescreen, a perfect pebbly beach and the Libyan Sea sparkling like flecks of golden dandruff shaken from the shoulders of the sun god Apollo.

It’s positively Elysian, a location scout’s dream… which is more than can be said of Knossos, back in Crete’s north, which we visit on our last day. You’d need a hell of a lot of CGI to recreate the Minotaur’s labyrinth from the tumble of old stone here – though you might as well not bother, according to our guide. The “maze” of legend refers simply to the vast number of rooms the palace/warehouse/temple complex contained, she says, pointing to repeated symbols hewn into the rock to waymark its different functional areas, like the different aisles in a supermarket. It’s not quite as magical when you think of it that way, but my boys love hunting for the “secret” signs: a double-headed Minoan axe carved subtly beside a doorway here, a trident etched at the foot of a passageway there.

It turns out, then – schmaltzy Hollywood ending alert – that it’s imagination rather than ingenious FX that brings the Percy Jackson stories and the Greek myths alive for my kids. Too cute? Don’t worry, they’re not above using what they’ve learned for nefarious ends. Late in the afternoon, the 11-year-old asks for something “authentically ancient Greek” to eat, and I am thrilled – until he quotes our guide’s aside earlier in the day concerning fifth century BC Athenians’ habit of mixing honey with snow from the mountains. He’s after ice cream, so it’s off to the resort’s gelato joint again. Never underestimate the inspirational, educational power of soft-scoop and telly.

Ed Grenby was a guest of New Hotel in Athens (yeshotelsgr/newhotel) which offers doubles from £148, room only; Cretan Malia Park (cretanmaliapark.gr) which offers triples from £136, including breakfast; Greek Mythology Tours (greekmythologytours.com); and Kids Love Greece (kidslovegreece.com). Multiple airlines fly to Crete and Athens, and there are plenty of flights and ferries between the two (try aegeanair.com or minoan.gr), so an “open-jaw” trip can be put together simply.

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