On the 27^th of September 2025, my wife Cassi and I were on one of our epic walks through the city of Athens. We were by this stage pretty jaded, thinking it was highly unlikely we would see anything incredible, after over ten years of rambling on foot and bicycle around this town and photographically recording and archiving it. On this day we were walking from Veikou, were we walked the hill there, to Nea Ioania a few kilometres to the north west of it.

Walking through and around one relatively ordinary square, we saw the first of these incredible  and unfamiliar sites. On top of a hill looming over a sports complex stood what I can only describe as a Soviet style water tower, including even a single star on top of it. We were blown away.

We started walking towards it trying to find out how to climb up to it. It happened that we bumped into a lady who was working at the stadium and on seeing us taking shots asked if we were photographers and what were we doing. We got chatting and she told us she was a member of an amateur photo group in the area and that we should check their page out. She also told us about the water tower, that it had been a major siphon raising the waters from the now dry river in the area to feed it over to the other side of the same hill to distribute fresh water there. So finally we made our way up to amazing water cistern and were disappointed to see that we could not climb all the way to the top of it since for safety it is closed off, but you can at least get all the way to the top of the cliff and the foot of the walls of the structure.

One thing we didn’t catch was what she said about an aqueduct. I kind of assumed she was talking about a modern system.

Looking out from the top of the cliff what caught my eye was a structure that looked positively ancient, but it was almost completely overwhelmed by massive growth of vegetation. So excited and quizzical we made our way back down, managed to find a break in the fence surrounding the site, we climbed in and came up to the most incredible sight we had seen in a long time.

What we saw were the remains of the upright sections of what I judged to be of Roman origin. But of course we’d never heard of a Roman aqueduct in the area, or indeed anywhere in Athens.

Excitedly we looked up the site online to see an article referring to it on the Smithsonian mag site.

Later, we looked some more into it and found a much more comprehensive article about it and were blown away all over again.

It has been our experience in all the epic walking and shooting we’ve done over the years, that a city, especially one as ancient as Athens, never stops giving the interested person new wonders to be amazed by.