Athens, Greece
Ακρόπολη Αθηνών · Akrópoli Athinón
A temple with almost no straight line in it, built in nine years, used for two thousand, and blown open by one shell in 1687. Around it, on one rock, the gate, the small temples and the theatres of classical Athens.
Photo: A.Savin, CC BY-SA 3.0, Wikimedia Commons
The temple in front of you is the Parthenon. It was built between 447 and 438 BC for Athena, the goddess who protected Athens. For the next two thousand years it was a church, then a mosque. In 1687 a shell set off gunpowder stored inside, and it became what you see.
Look again. The columns and steps seem straight. Not one of them is.
Close by, with a page of its own: Acropolis Museum.
The Parthenon is one building on the Acropolis. One site ticket covers the four classical buildings on top and the two theatres on the south slope. The Acropolis Museum at the foot of the hill is a separate place with a separate ticket and a page of its own. Many visitors assume one ticket covers both and find out at the door.
| Part | Ticket |
|---|---|
| The Propylaea (the gate) | Site ticket |
| Temple of Athena Nike | Site ticket |
| The Parthenon | Site ticket; outside only |
| The Erechtheion | Site ticket |
| Theatre of Dionysus | Site ticket |
| Odeon of Herodes Atticus | Seen from the path above; going in needs a ticket for a performance |
| Acropolis Museum | A separate place with its own ticket; see its own page |
In 480 BC a Persian army took Athens and burned the temples on this rock. Thirty years later Athens had won the war and led a league of Greek cities. The statesman Pericles spent a great sum, part of it paid in by the allies, to build this temple on the ruins. From the first stone to the dedication took nine years.
The floor rises a little in the middle. The columns swell slightly and lean inwards. The builders made these curves too small to notice, and the result looks more upright and more alive than a truly straight building would.
The white stone is not how it looked. The sculptures were painted blue, red and purple. About half of what survives is in the Acropolis Museum at the foot of the hill. The other half is in the British Museum in London. Greece has asked for it back for more than forty years.
"Greek temples were white." They were painted. Almost all the colour has gone, and the idea of white classical marble comes largely from European taste of the 1700s and 1800s. Recent tests have found traces of the pigment Egyptian blue on the sculptures.
"It fell down with age." It stood complete for more than two thousand years. Earthquakes did not bring it down. The explosion of 1687 did.
"You can go inside." You cannot. Visitors walk round the outside, behind a rope.
"The Acropolis and the Parthenon are the same thing." The Acropolis is the whole rock. The Parthenon is the largest of several buildings on it. The huge lone columns you can see to the south-east are a different temple, of Olympian Zeus, with its own ticket.
Some visitors have read that the building is a modern invention. The evidence against that comes from sides that had no reason to agree. Athens carved its building accounts on stone, and those stones were dug up. Ottoman tax registers of the 1500s list it as the mosque of the fortress of Athens, and the traveller Evliya Çelebi described it around 1667. Venetians and Ottomans both recorded the explosion.
Visitors come up through the gate at the west end and walk round the outside of the temple. The first seven stops follow that walk. The stops after them are the other buildings on the rock, the two theatres on its slope, and the museum below.
Through the gate, the Parthenon stands ahead and to the right. What you see first is its west end and north side: its back and its flank. The front faces east, towards the sunrise, and you must walk to the far end to see it.
Some numbers. The temple is about 70 metres long and 31 wide. There are 46 outer columns: eight at each end and seventeen on each side, counting the corners once. Each is about 10.4 metres high and has twenty flutes. The marble came from Mount Pentelikon, about 16 kilometres away. No mortar was used. The blocks were cut to fit and held with metal clamps.
The architects were Iktinos and Kallikrates. The sculptor Phidias had charge of the whole. Work began in 447 BC, the statue went in in 438, and the outside sculpture was finished in 432.
Stand at a corner, put your eye near the edge of a step, and look along the long side. The step rises in the middle. On the short ends the centre is about 6 centimetres higher than the corners. On the long sides it is about 11.
The same thing runs through the whole building. The columns swell in the middle and narrow towards the top. All of them lean slightly inwards. The four at the corners are a little thicker, because they stand against bright sky and would look thin. The beam above the columns curves with the floor.
So almost every block has its own shape and had to be worked out and cut by itself. To finish that in nine years was a feat of organisation.
Why they did it is disputed. The Roman architect Vitruvius said it corrected the eye: from a distance a truly straight line seems to sag. The scholar Jeffrey Hurwit argues that the curves make the building seem to flex and live, like a sculpture. The rise in the floor also sheds rainwater.
The sculpture came in three bands. Most of what is on the building now is a copy. The originals were moved indoors, away from weather and fumes.
The pediments, the two triangles under the roof. The east one showed the birth of Athena, fully armed, from the head of her father Zeus. The west one showed her contest with Poseidon, god of the sea, for the city.
The metopes, the square panels above the columns. There were 92, and every one was carved, which no other Greek temple can claim. Each side showed a battle: gods against giants on the east, Greeks against Amazons on the west, the Trojan War on the north, Lapiths against centaurs on the south. The four stories say one thing: order beats brute force. Athens had just beaten Persia, and was telling its own story through myth.
The frieze, a band 160 metres long round the top of the inner wall, behind the columns. It is usually read as the procession of the Panathenaic festival: riders, chariots, water-carriers and animals for sacrifice, moving towards the east end, where a newly woven robe is handed over for Athena. It sat high in the shade of the colonnade and was hard to see from below.
No ancient text says what the frieze shows. The festival is the usual answer. In 1996 the archaeologist Joan Connelly proposed that the centre shows a mythical king of Athens giving up his daughter for sacrifice. Both readings are still argued.
On the west and north sides most of the metope figures are a blur. That is not all weather. When the temple became a Christian church, the faces and bodies of the pagan gods were hacked off on purpose.
The panel at the west end of the north side is better kept. It shows a standing goddess facing a seated one. One explanation is that Christians took it for the angel Gabriel and the Virgin Mary and spared it. Many scholars repeat this. No document proves it.
The centaur panels on the south side were hidden by buildings attached to the church and so escaped. The best of them are now in the British Museum.
The east end is the front. Inside the door stood Phidias's Athena: a wooden frame, ivory for the face and arms, gold for the dress and armour, about 12 metres high, with a figure of Victory on her right hand. The historian Thucydides says the gold weighed about 40 talents, roughly a tonne, and could be taken off. It was the gold reserve of Athens.
Behind the statue was a second room, opening to the west, that held the treasury of Athens and its allies. So the Parthenon was a temple and a bank. Many Greek cities saw it as a monument Athens had built for itself with their money. Calling it a symbol of democracy is mostly an idea of the 1700s and after.
The statue vanished long ago. To see what it looked like, go to the National Archaeological Museum in Athens, which has a Roman marble copy about a metre high.
Along the south side the columns are most broken. The reason is 1687.
Around the 500s AD the temple became a church of the Virgin Mary, and a rounded apse was added at the east end. In 1204 crusaders took Athens and made it a Catholic cathedral. After the Ottomans took the city in 1458 it became a mosque, with a minaret at the south-west corner.
Turning it into a church and a mosque sounds like damage. It was the opposite. Because the building was always in use, somebody always mended the roof, and it reached 1687 whole.
On 26 September 1687 a Venetian army was besieging the Acropolis. The Ottoman garrison had stored its gunpowder in the temple. A mortar shell hit it. The roof, the inner room and the middle columns were blown out, and about 300 people died.
Afterwards the Venetian commander Morosini tried to take the horses from the west pediment as a trophy. The ropes broke and the sculptures smashed on the rock.
The same event reads differently on each side. A Venetian account calls it a lucky shot; the garrison surrendered days later. For the Ottomans it was the loss of a mosque used for two centuries. For later Greeks it was two foreign empires fighting on their holy ground.
Between 1801 and 1812 the men of Lord Elgin, British ambassador to the Ottoman court, took down about half of the sculpture that survived.
Walk the full circle and look at the columns again. The colours differ. Old stone is honey-yellow. New stone, set in during repairs, is white. It comes from the same mountain and will yellow in time.
This is the restoration that began in 1975. Its first task was to undo the last one. Ancient masons sealed their iron clamps in lead so they would not rust. The engineer Balanos, who rebuilt the north colonnade between 1898 and 1933, used bare iron. It rusted, swelled and cracked the marble from inside. Now each block is taken down, the iron is taken out, titanium goes in, and the block goes back.
Elgin sold the sculptures to the British government in 1816 for 35,000 pounds. They have been in the British Museum since. The British position is that Elgin had permission from the Ottoman authorities, and that an Act of 1963 forbids the museum to give objects away. Greece has formally asked for them since 1983. It says a permit from an occupying power does not count, and that nobody has ever produced the original. The talks go on.
This is the front gate of the Acropolis, and visitors still come up through it. The architect was Mnesikles. Work began in 437 BC and stopped in 432. The next year the war with Sparta began, and nobody took it up again.
Look at the wall blocks. Small knobs of stone stick out of them. They held the ropes when the blocks were lifted, and were to be cut off at the end. They are still there. That is what an unfinished building looks like.
On the last steps up, look to your right. A very small temple stands on a bastion beside the gate. It is in the Ionic style, by Kallikrates, of the 420s BC, for Athena as bringer of victory.
In 1686 the Ottoman garrison pulled it down and used the stone for a gun platform. After Greek independence the blocks were found and put together again, and it has been taken apart and rebuilt twice more since. The carved frieze is now in the museum.
Past the gate, the Parthenon is on your right and this temple on your left. It was finished in 406 BC. Two years later Athens lost its war with Sparta.
The south porch has no columns. Six statues of young women carry the roof. The six on the hill are copies. Five originals are in the Acropolis Museum. The sixth was taken by Elgin and is in the British Museum.
Greek temples are usually plain rectangles. This one is on several levels, with porches facing different ways. Several old holy places crowded this patch of ground, and the building had to fit round them. An olive tree grows on its west side today, planted in memory of the one in the myth.
On the south slope, the first thing you pass if you enter from the south-east. It is generally held to be the birthplace of Western drama. It was rebuilt in stone in the 300s BC and held about 17,000 people.
The plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides and the comic writer Aristophanes were first performed on this slope.
On the south-west slope. A side path from the way up looks down into it. It was built in AD 161 by a rich Athenian, Herodes Atticus, in memory of his wife Regilla. That is about six hundred years after the Parthenon. It seated five to six thousand and once had a wooden roof.
The Athens festival plays here from June to September. At other times it is closed, and the only way in is a ticket for a performance. The musician Yanni recorded his concert Live at the Acropolis here in 1993. Many listeners, in China as elsewhere, first saw the Acropolis on that recording.
Most of the sculpture you saw on the rock is copy. The originals are in the Acropolis Museum at the foot of the hill, about five minutes on foot from the south exit: five of the maidens, the frieze of the Nike temple, and what Athens still has of the Parthenon.
The museum is a separate place with its own ticket, and it has a page of its own here. Go there after the hill.
Confucius died in 479 BC. The year before, the Persians had burned this rock. Thirty years later the Parthenon was begun.
The tomb of Marquis Yi of Zeng in Hubei was closed around 433 BC, in the very years the Parthenon's sculpture was being finished. In it lay a set of 65 bronze bells tuned across five octaves. On one side of the world, curves worked out for thousands of marble blocks; on the other, pitches worked out for 65 bells. Neither knew of the other. The bells are in the Hubei Provincial Museum in Wuhan.
The blue on the Parthenon sculptures is Egyptian blue, a man-made copper calcium silicate. From about the same centuries China made its own man-made pigments, Chinese blue and Chinese purple, of copper barium silicate, later used on the Terracotta Army. The two are close cousins. Some scholars think the Chinese recipe was inspired by the Egyptian one. Others point out that no Egyptian blue has been found in China and hold that it was invented there.
A Chinese visitor here may think of the Old Summer Palace in Beijing: both were wrecked by foreign armies, both have treasures in foreign museums, and both have been asking for them back for generations. The cases differ too. The Old Summer Palace was looted and burned on purpose. The Parthenon was blown up in a battle, and its sculptures were taken down a century later by a diplomat.
Nashville, Tennessee, has a full-size copy of the Parthenon, first put up for an exhibition in 1897 and rebuilt in concrete by 1931. Since 1990 it has held a rebuilt Athena about 13 metres high by the sculptor Alan LeQuire, gilded in 2002. It is the only place to see the temple whole, with its goddess inside.
The Lincoln Memorial in Washington (1922) takes its outline from the Parthenon, with the door moved to the long side and Lincoln seated where the goddess stood. The row of columns under a triangle on banks and law courts across the Western world goes back to this building.
English poets took sides over the marbles. Byron attacked Elgin in The Curse of Minerva (1811) and in Childe Harold's Pilgrimage (1812). Keats saw the sculptures in London and wrote the sonnet On Seeing the Elgin Marbles (1817) in wonder.
Dull is the eye that will not weep to see Thy walls defaced, thy mouldering shrines removed By British hands
Byron, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, Canto II (1812)
| Year | Here | Elsewhere |
|---|---|---|
| 480 BC | The Persians burn the temples on the Acropolis | Confucius is an old man with a year to live |
| 447 BC | The Parthenon is begun | China is entering the Warring States period (475–221 BC) |
| 438 BC | The statue of Athena is dedicated | The Buddha, by one common dating, is teaching in northern India |
| 433 BC | The sculptures are nearly done | Marquis Yi of Zeng is buried with his 65 bells |
| 431 BC | Work on the gate has stopped | The war between Athens and Sparta begins |
| AD 161 | Herodes Atticus builds his theatre | Marcus Aurelius becomes emperor in Rome; the Eastern Han (AD 25–220) rules China |
| 500s | The Parthenon becomes a church | Hagia Sophia is built in Constantinople; the Sui will soon reunite China |
| 1458 | The Ottomans take Athens; the church becomes a mosque | The Forbidden City in Beijing is 38 years old |
| 1687 | The explosion | Newton publishes the Principia; the Kangxi Emperor rules China |
| 1801–1812 | Elgin's men remove the sculptures | Napoleon is at war with most of Europe |
| 1860 | Athens is the capital of a new Greek state; clearing of the rock goes on | The Old Summer Palace in Beijing is looted and burned |
| 1975 | The present restoration begins | — |
| 2009 | The Acropolis Museum opens | — |
One line to remember: nine years to build, two thousand years in use, one shell.
These are stories people tell about this place. They are legends, not history, and each one says where it comes from.
Athena and Poseidon both wanted this city. Poseidon struck the rock with his trident and a spring of salt water came up. Athena made an olive tree grow. The Athenians chose the olive, and the city took her name.
Source: Apollodorus, Library 3.14; shown on the west pediment of the Parthenon
When the Persians burned the Acropolis the sacred olive burned with it. The next day Athenians who came up found a new shoot on the stump, already a cubit long.
Source: Herodotus, Histories 8.55
Zeus had a terrible headache. Hephaestus split his head with an axe, and Athena sprang out, grown and in armour.
Source: Hesiod, Theogony; Pindar, Olympian 7; shown on the east pediment
After Elgin's men carried one of the six maidens away, people in Athens said that at night the five who were left could be heard crying for their sister.
Source: A story told in Athens in the early 1800s and repeated by travellers of the time
Later, people who live here will be able to add the stories they grew up with, and say which of these they have heard.
Last checked 2026-11-11. Travel guides checked in 2026; the two official ticket sites were not opened for this check.
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