Places inesgmartins Wants to Go

This Budapest bar allows drinkers to leave their mark on the walls, floor, and even ceiling.

This church combines Christian, Byzantine, and ancient Greek architectural elements.

This quaint farm in the Peloponnese countryside hides an astonishing cache of antique curiosities.

A seaside castle complex that stood through centuries of conquests.

A small island with shimmering pink sands, home to loggerhead turtles and rare plants.

One of the largest single-span stone-arch bridges in the Balkans looks like something straight out of a fairytale.

An abandoned Byzantine fortress and notorious prison.

The ghost town where the villagers refuse to leave.

This wrecked ghost ship has been rusting on a Greek beach since the 1980s.

This field of half-buried stone crosses was the burial place of a sect of heretical gnostics.

This abandoned Greek island was the last active leper colony in Europe.

This town named for the ancient God of War is home to fewer than a thousand people, but it's the birthplace of the Greek Revolution.

This secret coastal village is studded with pastel-colored houses all piled on top of one another.

The ruins of this monumental city founded by the first Roman Emperor are strangely overlooked by most travelers.

This 15th-century island fortress later served as home to the executioners no one wanted to live near.

The hermits of Karoulia protect their asocial lifestyles by living on the vertical face of a treacherous precipice.

Local lore says two enemy dragons live within these breathtaking mountain lakes.

Seventeen oak trees sprout from the roof and walls of this tiny chapel without any visual evidence of roots.

An autonomous republic of Orthodox monks.

These ruins in Volvi were once at the intersection of the Eastern and Western Worlds.

Thousands of rusting train cars have been slowly falling apart on the edge of Greece's second largest city.

The railway carts travelers to central Athens's highest peak, which offers stunning vistas of the city.

The ruins of an abandoned medieval city where the last Byzantine emperor was crowned.

Perched on a spindly rock spire in a Greek archipelago, this lighthouse would make a perfect wizard's tower.