The Acropolis

From dazzling festivals honouring the goddess Athena to the engineering marvels of the Parthenon, Dan and classical historian Steve Kershaw explore how the Acropolis became the ultimate symbol of democracy, power, and devotion in Ancient Greece. Steve and Dan explain everything you need to know about this ancient hill that towers over the centre of Athens - from its role in Ancient Greek life, what the Parthenon friezes depict and how Lord Elgin controversially removed huge chunks of it to send back to Britain. This is the final episode in our travel history series 'Dan Snow's Guide to Europe'. Produced by Mariana Des Forges and edited by Dougal Patmore Join Dan and the team for a special LIVE recording of Dan Snow's History Hit on Friday, 12th September 2025! To celebrate 10 years of the podcast, Dan is putting on a special show of signature storytelling, never-before-heard anecdotes from his often stranger-than-fiction career, as well as answering the burning questions you've always wanted to ask! Get tickets here, before they sell out: https://www.kingsplace.co.uk/whats-on/words/dan-snows-history-hit/. You can also get tickets for the live show of 'The Ancients' here - https://www.kingsplace.co.uk/whats-on/words/the-ancients-2/ We'd love to hear your feedback - you can take part in our podcast survey here: https://insights.historyhit.com/history-hit-podcast-always-on. You can also email the podcast directly at [email protected] mailto:[email protected]. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Dan Snow?

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• 1:58Dan Snow?

  The ancient Panathenaea festival took place on the Acropolis, the rocky hill that dominates the centre of Athens. And it was a sight to behold. Up the Panathenaeic way that zigzags from the city itself up to the Acropolis, crowds jostled in their hundreds to catch a glimpse of the processions. There were athletics, it was music, and it was a general celebration. It was a festival to mark the goddess Athena's birthday. And that mattered, because this was Athena's city. And by celebrating her birthday, you were celebrating the city's founding. You were celebrating Athens.

• 2:41Dan Snow?

  And for Athenians, this meant they were celebrating the end of tyranny, the dawn of democracy, of the rule of the people. Well, amen. But it wasn't just the men who would be found moving up that path towards those temples and statues at the top. The air would have been dusty. It would have somehow tasted of olive oil, I think. You would have smelt the cattle sweating up the hill with reeds in their horns. You'd have had horses with their flanks shiny, the swords of their riders glinting in the sunlight. Behind those riders, there would have been maidens, their faces composed, carrying baskets on their head with all sorts of produce,

• 3:24Dan Snow?

  including barley, and a sacrificial knife hidden upon them, needed for the opening rituals. Elsewhere on the Acropolis, there would have been sprinters, racing, men wrestling in the dust, musicians plucking at their instruments and singing, all vying for the coveted prize, the Panathenaeic amphora, filled with olive oil from the sacred grove in Athens. As the animals were sacrificed, those competitions were held, poetry was read. You'd think it lasted a week, possibly even 12 days. In the end, there was this grand procession that would have been attended by citizens and foreigners alike, not slaves though. And the purpose of that was to bring a new extravagant sort of robe or shawl to the enormous statue of Athena on the Acropolis.

• 4:09Dan Snow?

  And it was said that that was so big it had to be carried on a ship's mast. And the ship itself, weirdly, they brought the ship along with the mast, and it's made its way over the land in an enormous wheeled cart. Now, if you've been lucky enough to visit the Acropolis in Athens, you know that it's not easy climbing that big, steep, rocky hill. And therefore, how astonishing it must have been to witness that procession indeed in that ship being dragged to the top of it. The limestone outcrop has been sacred, we think, since the Bronze Age at least, long before the big temples like the Parthenon that are there now were perched on top. It was a fortified hill, there was a small shrine to Athena Polias, the city's protector, and over time it became Athens's ceremonial heart.

• 4:54Dan Snow?

  It isn't just a site of stunning ancient architecture, it's the beating heart of Athens. It's a place where religion and politics and identity have all met, and they've done so for millennia. So if you're visiting Athens this year, or you always wondered what is the difference really between the Acropolis and the Parthenon? Well, this is the episode for you. I'm joined by the really fantastic classical historian Steve Kershaw, a buddy of mine, we travel around Greece together, to bring you an ultimate guide to the history of the Acropolis in Athens. Enjoy.

• 5:26Dan Snow?

  Hi Steve, welcome to the podcast.

• 5:28Speaker 06

  Thank you very much Dan, I'm delighted to be here, absolutely delighted to be here.

• 5:33Dan Snow?

  Steve, I think you and I once had a beer overlooking the Acropolis, and you cannot miss that geology, that bit of rock. So way before Athens existed, presumably, humans thought, "Hang on, this is a decent place to live, to protect ourselves, to get away from it all."

• 5:49Speaker 06

  Absolutely, it's a remarkable chunk of the Athenian landscape, really. You've got this quite sheer but not that high hill, big limestone outcrop that's got a nice flat top where you can go and hide and defend yourself, I think, and where you can worship your gods from. It's got springs in the side of it as well, so you've got all the natural resources you need. It's perfect. And people have been making use of that since, yeah, kind of way back in the Stone Age.

• 6:20Dan Snow?

  Really? So we've got Neolithic settlers up there. When do we start to see ancient Greece come together as people will recognise it? Is it Minoan? Is it Mycenaean? What's the earliest bit of that Bronze Age culture we see up there?

• 6:32Speaker 06

  Yeah, I'd say really it's the Mycenaean period where things really start to get going. And you see constructions there. There's still evidence of construction up there on the Acropolis. You've got, if you like, palatial structures there and what they call these cyclopean walls, these walls that are built out of masonry that's so huge that later Greeks didn't really believe that human beings could erect them. It had to be the Cyclops that built them. So they called it cyclopean masonry. So you get some of that up there.

• 7:02Dan Snow?

  And at the risk of getting a bit ancient aliens here, do we know now? Do we think we know how they would have gotten those enormous rocks up there?

• 7:09Speaker 06

  Yeah, I mean, one of the particular pieces of cool technology they had was a pendulum saw that would sort of swing on a pendulum and you could cut sort of huge chunks of rock like that in fairly efficient ways. So there's, yeah, we don't need ancient aliens. We just need a bit of decent ancient technology and some good bronze hardware.

• 7:29Dan Snow?

  So we've got Mycenaeans up there. When do we get something called Athens?

• 7:35Speaker 06

  It kind of comes in, I suppose, around the seventh, eighth, seventh centuries B.C., BCE, if you prefer, when you start to see structures there being built on the Acropolis. And it becomes essentially an area that's sacred to the goddess Athena, who's the main patron deity of Athens. So we start to see constructions there that increase and multiply and become more impressive over time.

• 8:03Dan Snow?

  That's interesting. So around about the time that Homer is reciting or composing his Iliad nodacy, we see Athens taking shape, do we?

• 8:11Speaker 06

  I think we do, yes, absolutely. And the Athenians are very keen that they should be interpolated into Homer's poems. So their mythical kings end up in the catalogue of ships that send forces to Troy, and they start to develop the Acropolis as a sacred area, as well as, if you like, a defensive stronghold. It's around that time, as the city is growing from its small beginnings into something that becomes mighty, powerful and very cultural.

• 8:38Dan Snow?

  And is the city up there to start with? Or is it always a last bastion and a religious site? Is the city down, close to the sea, down in the lower ground?

• 8:45Speaker 06

  Yeah, the city is underneath it really. Acropolis, that word means the high city. So it's a stronghold, a religious place. Generally speaking, the city grows up around it, at the base of the Acropolis, and then spreads into the surrounding farmlands. And Athens is also near enough to the sea to be able to connect itself to good ports and the world beyond.

• 9:09Dan Snow?

  What do we know about these early temples? Because there was a landscaping that went on over the centuries that followed.

• 9:15Speaker 06

  Yeah, there was much building, and there was particularly under the reign of what they call the Pisistratids. Athens had a tyrannical regime, but they made major building projects. So you have some quite large temples being put up there on the Acropolis in about the 6th century BC, which are large-scale buildings with very impressive sculptures attached to them as well. So it's developed as a monumental complex from around the 6th century BC onwards.

• 9:41Dan Snow?

  And does the story of the Acropolis that we recognise today, does that start with the great Persian invasion of 480 BC? The aftermath, the Battle of Thermopylae that people will be familiar with?

• 9:55Speaker 06

  Yeah, it does in many ways, because after the Battle of Thermopylae, before the Greek victories at Salamis ultimately, Athens was sacked by the Persians. That was one of their war aims. And a great deal of material on the Acropolis was simply destroyed and burnt. So after the Persian invasions, essentially, the Acropolis was...

• 10:16Speaker 06

  The Athenians ground zero, if you like, it was just a smouldering ruin. And decisions then had to be made about what to do with it. Originally, they decided that they would leave it desolate as a, in their words, as a monument to the sacrilege of the barbarians. But ultimately, they then decided that they would change that policy and they would start a major construction project about in the middle of the fifth century.

• 10:41Dan Snow?

  I mean, it's an extraordinary construction project. Is something going on Athens at the time? Is the money flowing in? What is this? Because there's an imperial flavour to it, isn't there? I mean, it's a monumental project.

• 10:53Speaker 06

  It is. And this is interesting, I think, because it's essentially, it is an imperial project and it's not paid for by the Athenians. So after the Persian invasions, the Greeks essentially went on the offensive to try and recoup their losses in the war. And Athens became the focus of a coalition that fought a war of revenge against the Persians. But it ultimately converted what had been a free confederacy of Greek states into its own empire. And they had a treasury where they collected the funds. In due course, they moved that treasury from the sacred island of Delos to Athens.

• 11:33Speaker 06

  And those funds then became the wherewithal with which they built those amazing buildings on the Acropolis.

• 11:42Dan Snow?

  What was that sort of protection money? That's going into the pot to protect us from the Persians and now it's suddenly getting used to create grandiose imperial projects in Athens?

• 11:50Speaker 06

  Exactly so, yes. Much of this was dedicated to the goddess Athena. They essentially, they creamed off one sixtieth of it and used that to make their building projects on the Acropolis. So it's not really a monument to democracy and freedom in its originality. It's very much an imperial monument that's a testament to the might and the financial ruthlessness of the Athenians and their leaders.

• 12:16Dan Snow?

  Yeah, that's interesting, Steve, because I was going to ask about how it reflects the Athenian democracy that people will be familiar with and is seen as a great model and is very exciting. Actually, the story of the Acropolis doesn't seem... Super relevant. Athenian democracy in the Acropolis are all kind of slight distinct strands of Athenian history.

• 12:32Speaker 06

  Yeah, in a sense they are. I mean, they're tangled up with each other. By the time that they were making the building projects there, they developed their democracy over a period of 150 years or so to quite a radical form of that democracy. But they were powerful enough then to exert control over a wider empire and to use the funds that flowed in from that as the means to build. And they're quite transparent about it. They publish all over the Acropolis were monuments inscribed in stone with the accounts. We know who was paying what, where the money was come from, how it was being spent, the kind of materials that were coming in. The Athenians were as good democrats, they were

• 13:17Speaker 06

  certainly into transparency. But it's quite interesting what they're transparent about.

• 13:23Dan Snow?

  Tell people what the Acropolis would have looked like then at the end of this astonishing building spree. You walk up to it and you don't come to the Parthenon, the huge classical temple straight away. What did you come to first?

• 13:36Speaker 06

  No, you don't. It's amazing how you're manipulated as you go up there, I think. It was really interesting. They've used the architectural principles, I think of, if you like, preparation, tension and release. So it creates excitement, feeling of anticipation, and then it gives you your big exciting view when you get up there. So as you ascend the Acropolis, first of all, there's a small temple to Athena Nike, the victory aspect of Athena, the war goddess, on your right.

• 14:03Dan Snow?

  It's beautiful, isn't it? It's on a little sort of spur. It looks like it's almost floating above the city. It's beautiful.

• 14:08Speaker 06

  Absolutely. It's exquisite, tiny, sort of built in the Ionic style, very small, very elegant. They sometimes call it the temple of wingless victory, the victory that would never fly away from Athens. It's a beautiful thing that you see and it's up there above you as you head on in. It's gorgeous. And then as you head on in, you come to a structure that's known as the propylea. It's the great monumental gateway, which has a great doorway in front of you and sort of wings that envelop You on either side. And as you ascend, you lose sight of all the other buildings that's there and you go from out of the light into the dark. And then you emerge again into the light and in front of you, above you, slightly to your

• 14:50Speaker 06

  right, you have the towering presence of the Parthenon Temple. And over to your left, you have the Eric Thion Temple, which is perhaps more important religiously. And in antiquity, also pretty much on axis, there would have been a huge bronze statue of Athena as well.

• 15:07Dan Snow?

  That's interesting. So where would the bronze statue of Athena been?

• 15:10Speaker 06

  So pretty much central, as you come straight through the gateway, smack in front of you.

• 15:16Dan Snow?

  And would you have been able to see that sort of shining from a long way away?

• 15:19Speaker 06

  You would. Apparently it was visible from sea. So it was a great monument, you know, Athenian seafarers coming home would eventually be able to see that monument as a symbol of their homecoming.

• 15:30Dan Snow?

  I bet that was a sight for sore eyes for mariners after a tough few weeks on the Aegean. Shall we think about the buildings, the structure on the slopes as part of this planned Theatre of Dionysus? Well, I think the two thirds, aren't they, where the, some of the great drama and comedy of all time would have been performed?

• 15:47Speaker 06

  Very much so. Down on the slopes, you've got principally, I guess, the most important space is the Theatre of Dionysus, which was, again, developed over a period of time. But that's where those extraordinary pieces of drama, the tragedies of Aeschylus and Sophocles and Euripides, the comedies of Aristophanes were played out. So that's a crucial aspect of the, if you like, the sacred complex that's there, because these are religious performances as well. And also as well, you get other monuments that come in at different times. People over history were keen to make their mark in Athens, perhaps by benefaction. So you have, amongst other things, you have the stower of Eumeneis,

• 16:30Speaker 06

  who was a ruler of the kingdom of Pergamon in the Hellenistic period. And then there's a later Roman structure, the Odeon, a kind of concert hall built by Herodes Atticus. So Athens constantly attracted benefactors over the years to enhance its public image.

• 16:50Dan Snow?

  You're listening to Dan Snow's History. There's more to come.

• 16:58Dan Snow?

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• 20:01Dan Snow?

  So the purpose of the Acropolis and all that, the building, is religious. It's imperial. Is it to celebrate the victory of Athens and the Greeks? Although I expect though other Greek contributions would get minimized as the way of these things, as we still see in the modern day. It's just a sort of giant celebration of Athenian-ness?

• 20:18Speaker 06

  In many ways it is, I think. It's a feel-good thing for the Athenians. It's constantly towering over them. It's a reminder of their past, their success in the past, their prosperity. So in a sense, it's about that. It's about their imperial prowess. It is religious as well. It's the focus of a lot of really important and often quite weird religious ceremonies. And it is also a fortified stronghold as well. So in a sense, it has a triple purpose. And I think reactions to it would be, as you say, very different. You know, an Athenian looking at that would respond very differently, I think, to, I don't know, one of the islanders who they ruled over, whose people had...

• 21:01Speaker 06

  Essentially paid for all of this. There might be different ways of looking at it over the time.

• 21:05Dan Snow?

  Tell me about some of those slightly weird festivals that went on.

• 21:08Speaker 06

  Oh goodness me. Well, there's the sort of mythical kings of Athens are so strange. The Athenians thought themselves as autochthonous. So they literally thought that they came from the land, the earth that they inhabited. They'd always been there and their early kings are kind of half man, half snake. Those early kings are worshipped on the Acropolis as well. Athena is their prime deity, Athens and Athena, the same thing. So she looks after them. She protects the city. Athena Polias, as they call her, the protector of the city, has an important shrine in the Eric Theon temple.

• 21:52Speaker 06

  And Athena Parthenos, Athena the maiden, Athena the virgin, is celebrated in the Parthenon temple as well, both with the temple and a huge gold and ivory statue. So Athena is up there, but it's not just her or the kings. There's Poseidon is up there because Athena and Poseidon contest the possession of Athens by performing miracles. Poseidon smashes his trident into the Acropolis and a saltwater well springs up, which they preserve in the Eric Theon. Athena makes the first olive tree grow, the first cultivated olive. And that's seen to be a much more useful gift and useful miracle.

• 22:35Speaker 06

  So she gets the gig. She becomes Athens's patron deity. So Poseidon and Athena are honoured there. Zeus of the city, he's honoured there as well. There's shrines to Artemis and various other deities. So and other Athenian mythical heroes there. So there's a whole conglomeration. It's very much the focus of Athenian religious response, if you like.

• 23:00Dan Snow?

  And along the top, sort of above the columns of the Parthenon, you've got the famous Parthenon frieze, which has been known in Britain for decades as the Elgin marbles because they were stolen, they were removed, they were preserved by Elgin, Lord Elgin. So first of all, what does the frieze show? And then let's get the Elgin thing sorted out.

• 23:18Speaker 06

  Yeah, the Parthenon has an amazing sculptural programme all around it, to an extent that no other building really in the ancient world had had up till that point. And it includes a frieze, it's about 160 metres long, that shows a procession. There's lots of discussion about what this procession is, but probably it's related to a festival known as the Panathenaea, which was held every year and then on a major scale every four years by the Athenians in honour of Athena, where they presented her with a new robe at these great festivals. And so you have a wonderful procession of initially horsemen getting ready and then a sort of great cavalcade of horsemen. In front of them, there are charioteers, in front of them, there are pedestrians, in

• 24:03Speaker 06

  front of them, there are animals for sacrifice. And then you sort of converge over the main entrance with female figures bringing sacrificial equipment. You have what are probably the heroes of the Athenian tribes as intermediaries between the mortals and the gods. And then in the middle, you have the 12 Olympian gods of Athens and a very, very strange ceremony going on with a robe right over the main door.

• 24:29Dan Snow?

  And who was Lord Elgin?

• 24:31Speaker 06

  Lord Elgin was, he had a wonderful title. He was the ambassador extraordinary and minister plenipotentiary of his Britannic Majesty to the sublime port of Selim III Sultan of Turkey. So he was an ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, based primarily in Istanbul, Constantinople. But because what is now Greece was then part of the Ottoman Empire, Greece was part of his patch. And at the time, he was sort of building a new house, Broom Hall in Scotland. And this was a great opportunity for him to have drawings made and casts made of the

• 25:14Speaker 06

  sculptures and the architectural elements to facilitate the building of this house in this new, most fashionable style. So there was a great opportunity for him to learn from the building and transport it back to Scotland in a sense, perhaps in a, just in a graphic sense to start with. But things kind of developed.

• 25:33Dan Snow?

  Well, they developed, didn't they? Because he ended up taking, like soaring them out and taking great big slabs of them home.

• 25:40Speaker 06

  Yes, he did. So what happened was the local guys on the ground, for a lot of the time Elgin himself wasn't there, he was in Constantinople, but he had a team of people who were there, including an Italian artist called Giovanni Battista Lucieri. And they were allowed to make the drawings and measurements, but they weren't allowed to put scaffolding up to make casts. So they asked for permission in the end from the central government of Turkey. And they acquired a letter, a thing that's called a firman, which is a hugely controversial document. The original of it doesn't survive. We have an Italian translation

• 26:19Speaker 06

  of it that was made for Lucieri, that gave them permission, perhaps. It says, "An instruction that no one meddle with their scaffolding or implements, nor hinder them from taking away any pieces of stone with inscriptions or figures." So you can interpret that how you like, I think. And they did.

• 26:40Dan Snow?

  And in the end, how much of that frieze was removed?

• 26:44Speaker 06

  So roughly half of it. Now, the sort of split between museums is that roughly 50% of it is in Athens, roughly 50% of it is in London, with a few outliers elsewhere in the Louvre and Copenhagen, in Munich and Würzburg and various other places. But the main collections are half in Athens, half in London.

• 27:07Dan Snow?

  And there was a lively debate and negotiations about whether that will in fact return from London to Athens. What state was it in when Lord Elgin turned up? Let's talk a little bit about the fate of the Acropolis. I guess in the immediate aftermath, Athens loses the Peloponnesian War to Sparta in the early 400s B.C. So very shortly after it's built, really, this great imperial monument, Athens goes and loses the Great Imperial War.

• 27:33Speaker 06

  It does, yeah. So Athens is ultimately defeated in the Peloponnesian War by the Spartans and then fades from its once amazing power base. The big power that's built up next really is the Macedonian power under Philip II, who's the father of Alexander the Great. So that becomes part of their realms. They are then rolled over by the Romans who take over Greece and Athens becomes part of the Roman Empire, which then merges into the Byzantine Empire, which is finally rolled over by the Ottomans in 1453, when Constantinople is taken. About three years later, Athens is taken over by Omar, one of the generals, and it

• 28:15Speaker 06

  becomes part of the Ottoman Empire at that stage. And that's the point it is when Elgin and his team go to Athens.

• 28:24Dan Snow?

  And what state was it? Was it maintained at any stage? Was it sacked or just looted? Or what state of preservation was it in over those changes of, sorry, various changes of regime?

• 28:35Speaker 06

  Yeah, it was in a bit of a mess, really, because after the pagan period, if you like, it had been a pagan temple for about a thousand years. It then became a Christian church. Christians were not particularly careful about the preservation of pagan things on their buildings, and they made modifications to the buildings. The Turks had no care for it really either. So it had had a rough old time of it over the years, some deliberate damage done to it and other damage, just the wear and tear of the environment. And also in a war between the Turks and the Venetians, where the Turks were storing ammunition in it, because the Acropolis was a military base for them, there was a huge

• 29:16Speaker 06

  explosion when the Venetians fired a shell into it, and that did a huge amount of damage as well. So the building has had a really, really rough old time of it over the centuries. So it was in a bit of a mess when Elgin's team got there.

• 29:29Dan Snow?

  Did Elgin, and I'm not justifying anything here, but did Elgin help that conservation, preservation by saving bits of it? Or did he actually speed up its deterioration, would you say?

• 29:39Speaker 06

  That's a good question. It cuts both ways, I think. It's that by taking it and preserving it, I mean, he felt very strongly that he was preserving it from, amongst other things, Turkish vandalism. That was one of the things he used to justify it, I think. And certainly, I think the high state of preservation of what is now in London is partly down to that. So in a sense, he preserved. He also damaged, of course, because in order to take these sculptures and things off the building, for a lot of the time, he had to dismantle parts of the building and saw them off. So it was a destructive and preservation process at one and the same time. And actually, removing from the building and putting them indoors has helped, because

• 30:23Speaker 06

  I think if you compare and contrast the casts that he made, so he also made casts of these buildings, casts at the time, you compare those with some of the things that are now in Athens, which had been on the building for an extra 200 years, you can see the state of decay that simply leaving them out in the open air has done. So it cuts both ways.

• 30:46Dan Snow?

  I know, Steve, when I went there recently, there's a huge amount of work going on. Is that, is that sort of conservation? Is it archaeology? Or is it, are they even doing a bit of reconstruction? What's the plan for the Acropolis?

• 30:57Speaker 06

  There's been a major plan that's been going on since the middle of the 1980s, actually. It's been going on a very long time. Yeah, so there's a sense of restoration and repair. They're putting things back where it's possible to put them back, and doing so in a way that you can see. So they're using material that's slightly whiter than the other material that's already on the building. So they're putting things back, they're strengthening, they're preserving, studying all the time, and generally trying to restore it in the best, most coherent and most sensitive way they can. The sculptures, not on the building, they've all been moved now to the absolutely stupendous Acropolis Museum just across the way. So they're safely

• 31:42Speaker 06

  cared for now. But yeah, it's a major ongoing project that's allowed us to learn, I think, a lot about the building and its construction techniques and its history.

• 31:53Dan Snow?

  It's very crowded, isn't it? I mean, I think the single most useful bit of advice I can give is to go as early as possible in the morning.

• 32:00Speaker 06

  Absolutely. I mean, it's a wondrous place to visit, but it's hugely popular. And I'm with you there. Either you should try and get there the second it opens, if you're going to make a visit, or go quite late in the day when the temperature has cooled a little bit. And you also get very nice light later on in the day as well, and you get that. But it's incredibly busy. And the, yeah, the Greeks now are seeking to control access to it as much as they can. So get a timed ticket if you're going to go as well.

• 32:28Dan Snow?

  Thank you so much, Steve.

• 32:29Speaker 06

  Pleasure.

• 32:30Dan Snow?

  I'm sure anyone listening to that wishes that it could go with you on a tour around, around the Acropolis. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast.

• 32:38Speaker 06

  Big pleasure, Dan. Thank you for having me.

• 32:42Dan Snow?

  Well, folks, it is hard to believe, yes it is, that we've arrived at the beginning of September. There's a bit of chill in the air where I am now. And my wife is driving me crazy because she is desperate to get the candles and the cosy blankets out and the sort of autumn vibe going. And she's joined in that devilish enterprise by Mariana de Forge, the producer of this podcast. So I'm getting it from both angles here. Us summer clingers on to are having it tough at the moment. Still feels like summer, so let it be, folks. This episode does, however, bring us the end of our special summer season, the travel season of Dan Snow's History. We've reached the end of our European tour for the summer of 2025. And we'll soon be back looking at the, I don't know, is it the darker history?

• 33:23Dan Snow?

  The autumnal history of autumn, of fall. We're going to be looking at medieval battles in mud choked fields, witch trials, and the Victorian macabre, which I trust you will find enjoyable. All I can do now is to ask you to leave us a little summer review wherever you get your podcasts, and let us know where you might like us to go next summer. Oh, happy thoughts. Our email address is [email protected]. See you next time. Bye bye.

• 34:09Speaker 02

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• 34:12Speaker 03

  We'll have room for fried cookies.

• 34:14Speaker 02

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• 34:17Speaker 04

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• 34:25Speaker 02

  Free phone? Oh, sign me up.

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• 34:31Speaker 01

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• 34:39Speaker 05

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• 34:56Dan Snow?

  Have you been enjoying my podcast and now want even more history? Sign up to History and watch the world's best history documentaries on subjects like how William conquered England, what it was like to live in the Georgian era, and you can even hear the voice of Richard III. We've got hundreds of hours of original documentaries plus new releases every week, and there's always something more to discover. Sign up to join us in historic locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit historyhit.com/subscribe.