NEW YORK, NY.- Whenever our family goes on long car rides, we’ve found that the best way to placate our children is to listen to the podcast “Greeking Out” from National Geographic Kids. Narrated by Kenny Curtis and the all-knowing, snake-loving “Oracle of Wi-Fi,” the show retells stories from ancient Greek mythology in colorful ways. After 10 seasons, our two boys have become well-versed in the minutiae of mythos. Did you know that the blind seer Tiresias was turned into a woman by Hera for seven years? I did not.

“It’s true,” said Holt, my 10-year-old son.

My kids are not alone. Greek mythology has had a renaissance of sorts among young people, driven largely by the wildly popular Percy Jackson children’s book series (and movies and musical) about a troubled modern-day boy who finds out he is actually a demigod and so must attend Camp Half-Blood. Naturally, things get complicated.

My younger son, Max, 7, has fallen deep under the demigod spell. He is also a hedonist, a lover of pleasures and chocolate, and predictably his favorite god is Dionysus, god of wine, festivity and madness.

Holt is more suspect of the Percy Jackson phenomenon. He likes facts, which is funny when you’re talking about mythology. Holt’s favorite god is Athena, goddess of battle strategy, wisdom and weaving. So I was always interested in some day taking my sons to Greece itself, source of all that history, where we could stare at ruins and try to square truth, story, wisdom and madness.

Our chance came when the Greek parents of one of Holt’s classmates invited us and another family to visit their family home on the island of Crete last summer.

“Be careful, we’ll come!” I warned. I wasn’t sure if their invitation was serious.

Their invitation was serious. Dead serious. When it comes to hospitality, the Greeks do not mess around — for them it is like an Olympic sport. If you go to a Greek’s house they will feed you food until you explode, and if you do not explode, they will feel like a failure. The only advice our Greek friends had for us before our trip was, “Don’t eat anything for a week.”

Ancient Wonders

Our little American crew of four adults and four children (all ages 10 and under) began our visit to Greece with three days in Athens. Before the 2004 Olympics, I had heard Athens was a hot, dirty, busy city — difficult to get around and certainly not kid-friendly. In recent years, however, the city has undergone a wide-scale humanization and become an accessible, world-class metropolis where ancient wonders rub up against the trappings of modernity.

We visited early in the summer last year, before extreme heat waves and wildfires hit Greece and other parts of Southern Europe. It was hot but not yet too hot, and we were among the many visitors in the Greek capital who filled their days buying cherries in Monastiraki Square, being serenaded by musicians plucking folk songs and exploring labyrinthine streets in the ancient neighborhood of Plaka. We cooled off in the playgrounds and water features on the giant sloping roof of the new National Library and Opera House, designed by the architect Renzo Piano.

But the highlight of Athens was our visit to the Acropolis.

If you’re traveling with children, particularly those who enjoy boysplaining Greek history to strangers, I would recommend hiring a guide for the Acropolis — there’s simply too much to take in. Our guide with the tour company Greeking.me was a patient, lovely woman named Antigoni. She was incredibly tolerant of our kids and within minutes offered to hire them as guides, which obviously pleased Holt to no end.

We began our tour at the quietly astonishing Acropolis Museum, designed by Bernard Tschumi. It’s built on an old archaeological site, and visitors can peer through its glass floors into the ruins below or gaze up to the Acropolis. The building seems to embrace the layered, messy, incomplete nature of history.

We spent nearly three hours going floor by floor, lingering on all the hundreds of carvings that once lined the Parthenon. The kids were transfixed. Antigoni explained that architectural refinements gave optical illusions to make the temple appear more perfect than it was. Over the centuries, Antigoni said, the Parthenon withstood all manner of earthquakes, shelling and plundering. Its enduring presence is a miracle.

One of the highlights for the children was a giant Lego re-creation of the Acropolis, in which various historical periods, from antiquity until the present, were represented in one diorama, as though time had collapsed into a single moment.

We then joined the sea of people flowing up the hill to the Acropolis itself, where the gates alone are worth the price of admission, as is the relatively petite-yet-exquisite Temple of Athena Nike keeping watch over all who enter.

Even in its perpetual state of rebuild, the Parthenon vibrates with idealism, all of those optical tricks and refinements acting as a perfect homage to that powerful, fragile concept called democracy, born on these very slopes.

I turned to Holt.

“What are you thinking?” I asked. Holt was always thinking.

“Nothing,” he said, wide-eyed. This may have been the highest praise coming from him.

Nearby, Max formed an invisible lightning staff and threw it into the crowd of tourists.

After our tour, ravenous, we descended back into the city to find one of Athens’ ubiquitous Greek tavernas. At the beginning of our trip, wary of young and hungry children, we would eat around 6 or 7 p.m. But where was everybody? It was only later that we learned this was an absurd time to eat dinner in Greece; Athenians do not emerge until 10 or 11. The prospect of eating this late with children gave me a minor panic attack.

We were glad we followed our friends’ advice: We did not have a bad meal the entire trip. Yet as the parents salivated over the Cretan dish Dakos (a twice-baked barley rusk topped with diced tomatoes and creamy feta), melitzanosalata (a smoky eggplant dip), heavenly tzatziki and succulent grape leaf dolmades, the children resisted. We ordered multiple plain pastas for the children as soon as we sat down. The only exception was Max, who sampled the adults’ snails, mussels and anchovies, and was pleased with the gasps and groans from the other children. Dionysus, indeed.

Searching for the Minotaur

After our Athens whirlwind, we flew to Crete, where the ancient Minoan civilization blossomed 5,000 years ago while the rest of Europe was mired in barbarianism.

With our Greek friends, we hiked gorges and built intricate palaces on pink-sand beaches. We stayed outside the port city of Chania, where the signs of various conquerors are still in evidence, including Ottoman baths, Venetian arsenals and a graceful Egyptian lighthouse perched on the end of a long sea wall. We drank raki, the local liquor, and devoured seafood, like razor-thin sea bass carpaccio, and early harvest, locally made olive oil.

At the Palace of Knossos, the seat of the Minoan Empire, we had another terrific tour guide, Akrivi Hatzigeorgiou, with the KidsLoveGreece.com tour company. She promptly handed all the children iPads with augmented reality apps that allowed them to see the ruins as they once were.

Akrivi showed us the palace’s sophisticated water management systems, the hidden network of signage and the throne room, with one of the oldest preserved chairs in Europe. We did not see the Minotaur that, as any good Greek child historian knows, supposedly haunted the labyrinth in the basement. In fact, we learned there was no basement at all and that there never was a King Minos, but rather a series of female rulers, a detail which had been conveniently overlooked by historians and storytellers since. Hearing this, Holt’s brain exploded. History evolves.

At the end of the tour, Akrivi thanked us. “The labyrinth is in our heads,” she said to the bewildered children. “The Minotaur is inside of us. We cannot beat the Minotaur, we must forgive the Minotaur.” Max nodded, as though he had known this all along.

On one of our last nights in Crete, we finally did as the Greeks do and dined around 11 p.m. Our kids were not tired; the taverna was filled to the brim with locals. We ordered one last Dakos salad. A round of raki came. The children seemed to sense this would all become history soon. It was fine — after a week in Crete, you too will forgive the Minotaur.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.