Parthenon

The Parthenon is the great marble temple of the goddess Athena on the Acropolis of Athens. Built between 447 and the 430s BCE, when Athens led the Delian League and was at the height of its power, it was meant in part as thanks for the Greek victory over the Achaemenid Persians. Its sculptures are counted among the finest works of classical Greek art. Over the following two thousand years it served as a church, a mosque and an ammunition store before an explosion in 1687 left it the ruin seen today.

An earlier temple to Athena was begun on the same spot after the Battle of Marathon around 490 BCE, but it was still unfinished when the Persians sacked Athens and razed the Acropolis in 480. The site lay in ruins for over thirty years, perhaps because of an oath not to rebuild the shrines the Persians had destroyed, perhaps simply because of cost. In the mid-fifth century Pericles launched the building programme that also produced the Propylaia, the Erechtheion and the Temple of Athena Nike. The sculptor Phidias oversaw the work, and the architects Iktinos and Kallikrates began in 447 BCE. The structure was essentially complete by 438, though carving went on into the early 430s.

Built of Pentelic marble, it is a Doric temple with eight columns across each end instead of the usual six, and it is full of subtle curves: the platform rises slightly at the centre and the columns swell and lean inward. Scholars still argue over whether these were optical corrections. The metopes showed mythical battles, a continuous frieze around the inner walls showed a procession usually identified with the Panathenaic festival, and the pediments showed the birth of Athena and her contest with Poseidon for Athens. Inside stood Phidias' huge statue of Athena in gold and ivory, whose gold Pericles said could be used as a reserve in wartime. Some scholars argue the building was less a cult temple than a grand setting for this votive statue and a treasury.

Around the middle of the third century CE a fire destroyed the roof, and the building was repaired in the fourth century. The emperor Theodosius II ordered pagan temples closed in 435, and at some point in the fifth century the Parthenon ceased to function as a temple and Athena's statue was carried off to Constantinople. Under the Byzantine Empire it became a church of the Virgin Mary, sometime between the late fifth and the late sixth century according to different accounts; an apse was added, and Christians defaced many of the metopes. It became a major pilgrimage site, visited by the emperor Basil II in 1018. After the Fourth Crusade, under Latin rule, it served for about 250 years as a Catholic church of Our Lady.

The Ottoman Empire took the Acropolis in 1458, and by the close of the fifteenth century the Parthenon had been turned into a mosque, its bell tower raised into a minaret. It remained largely intact; the artist Jacques Carrey drew its sculptures in 1674.

During the Morean War the Republic of Venice sent Francesco Morosini to attack Athens. The Ottomans stored gunpowder in the Parthenon, and on 26 September 1687 a Venetian mortar shell ignited it. The blast destroyed the centre of the building and killed about three hundred people. Morosini's men then broke sculptures from the west pediment while trying to remove them. A smaller mosque was later built inside the ruin, and stone was taken for building. In the first years of the nineteenth century agents of Lord Elgin removed about half of the surviving sculptures and shipped them to Britain, saying they had Ottoman permission; the legality of this remains disputed. During the Greek War of Independence the building was damaged again by Ottoman artillery in 1826–1827.

After Greece took control of Athens in 1832, the minaret was removed and the Acropolis was cleared of its medieval and Ottoman buildings. The Acropolis was listed by UNESCO as a World Heritage site in 1987. A systematic restoration programme began in 1975, correcting earlier repairs whose rusting iron clamps had cracked the marble, and fragile sculptures have been moved to the Acropolis Museum. In 1983 Greece made a formal request to Britain for the return of the sculptures held in the British Museum, and the museum has refused; UNESCO urged a negotiated settlement in 2021. In June 2026 the west pediment was unveiled after its full restoration.