Why the Parthenon Is a Ruin: 1687, Elgin, Balanos

Built in eleven years, finished in fifteen

Construction ran from 447 to 438 BC, with the pedimental sculpture completed a few years later, in 432 BC. Eight columns at each narrow end, seventeen along each side, designed by Iktinos and Kallikrates with Pheidias supervising the sculpture. Inside stood Pheidias's gold-and-ivory Athena, and from 433 BC the west chamber held the public funds of the city — the temple was also the treasury.

All of this comes from the Acropolis Restoration Service's own description of the monument.

Fire, then a church, then a mosque

In late Roman times the building suffered serious fire damage and was repaired in the fourth century AD, probably under the emperor Julian. Shortly after, it was altered to work as a church, and in 1205 it was dedicated to the Holy Mother of Athens. Athens fell to the Ottomans in 1460, and a few decades later the Parthenon was converted into a mosque — the stairway built into the south corner during the Latin occupation became the minaret.

Through every one of those conversions the structure itself held.

Which is the point worth carrying up the hill

Standing at the gate looking at the gaps, it is natural to read them as age. They are not. Twenty-two centuries of Athenian weather, earthquakes, empires and religions did less to this building than three human decisions taken in the last three hundred and forty years.

That is the story the visit does not tell you, because there is no sign on the rock that says it.

What the official record says

The Acropolis Restoration Service puts it in two sentences: “The greatest catastrophe in the entire history of the temple occurred in 1687 when it was bombarded during the siege of the Acropolis by the Venetians. The explosion of the gunpowder that the Turks had stored within the monument caused extensive parts of the temple to collapse and turned the monument into a ruin.” That is the whole of it, from the body responsible for the building. A Venetian army besieging the Acropolis; an Ottoman garrison using the temple as a powder magazine; a shell; the roof and the long walls gone in a moment.

What is repeated everywhere but is not in that record

The date is usually given as 26 September 1687, and the commander as Francesco Morosini. Casualty figures circulate widely — three hundred is the number you will see most often, sometimes with the detail that the garrison had moved families into the temple believing the Venetians would not fire on it. None of those figures appears in the Restoration Service's account, and we have not found them in a primary published record we could cite. They may well be accurate.

We are simply not going to print them as though they were established, on a page whose whole method is to say where a number came from.

The horses, which we also cannot vouch for

The best-known coda to the night is that Morosini then tried to lower the horses of Athena and Poseidon from the west pediment as a trophy, that the tackle failed, and that the sculptures shattered on the rock. It is a widely repeated account and it is not mentioned on the Restoration Service's page at all. Treat it as tradition rather than as record — which, given what the west pediment is going through right now, is a characteristically Athenian irony.

What actually came down

The official phrasing is “extensive parts of the temple”, and standing in front of it you can read which parts: the roof, the long side walls of the cella, and the columns of the flanks in the middle stretches. The two short ends, east and west, survived best, which is why the building still reads as a temple from the ends and as a quarry from the sides.

Eighteen, fifteen, fifty-six

The Acropolis Restoration Service writes that the picture of destruction “was completed during the 19th century with the systematic removal of the sculpture of the temple by Lord Elgin”, and gives the tally: eighteen pedimental statues, fifteen metopes and fifty-six blocks of the Ionic frieze were — their word — ‘ruthlessly severed’ from the Parthenon. Those pieces are in the British Museum. It is worth knowing that the official Greek phrasing is that blunt, because the language on the rock and in the museum is far more measured than the language in the technical documentation.

Why this changes what you see in two buildings

It is the reason the Acropolis Museum is laid out the way it is. The top floor is built to the Parthenon's own dimensions and orientation, with the surviving frieze blocks in their true positions and plain casts standing in for the ones in London — so the gaps are the exhibit. And it is why the Caryatids you see on the Erechtheion porch outside are copies: five originals are in the museum, one is in London. Rock or museum first argues the order.

Nikolaos Balanos, and iron

The Restoration Service names the landmark: “the restorations carried out by N. Balanos during the years 1896-1902 and 1923-1933”, which “have given the monument its present appearance”. Balanos re-erected fallen columns and blocks and pinned them together with iron clamps and dowels. Iron in marble in an Athenian climate does one thing: it oxidises, and rust occupies more volume than the metal it came from.

The clamps swelled inside their sockets and split the blocks they were holding — from the inside, invisibly, for decades.

And glue

The Service's own account of opening up the west wall is unsparing about what it found: fractures in the blocks of all three lower rows, “extensive chiseling off” of original marble, and “inappropriate materials (Meyer stone glue)” used in the older intervention. This is a state body describing an earlier generation of its own profession, in a public document, in those words.

Titanium instead

Everything reassembled since 1975 uses titanium, which does not corrode, together with new Pentelic marble cut to fill losses. That is the whole logic of the modern work: take the building apart where Balanos touched it, remove the iron, restore the fractured blocks and put them back with metal that will not do it again. It is why a restoration that began in 1975 is still going, and why it looks so slow to a visitor who assumes the job is ‘rebuilding the Parthenon’.

It is mostly undoing.

The west pediment, since June 2017

The current programme concentrates on the west pediment and the side walls of the cella. Work on the west pediment began in June 2017 and the Restoration Service describes it as having “a rescue character”: removing the oxidised clamps of the Balanos intervention, conserving and reinforcing the architectural members, and correcting the distortions in the orthostat blocks, which had “the most serious static problems” of anything on the building. Three middle blocks of the tympanum were dismantled, structurally restored and put back; a fourth was reinforced in place.

So the west front is the one to look at

If you come up through the Propylaea you meet the west end first, and that is currently the working face of the monument — which is either the disappointment of the visit or the most interesting thing on the rock, depending on whether you know what you are looking at. From Philopappos Hill, free and ten minutes away, you get the long south flank instead, which is the side the explosion opened.

There is no finish date, and that is not evasion

Every phase is funded and approved separately, studies are published per element, and the work is deliberately reversible. Nobody publishes a completion year for the Parthenon because the concept does not apply. If you want the state of play before you go, the Acropolis Restoration Service publishes its ongoing interventions monument by monument at ysma.gr — the same source every fact on this page came from.