Rock Hard and Inserting Rods

Ω ται λιπαραί και ιοστέφανοι και
αοίδιμοι, Ελλάδος έρεισμα,
κλειναί Αθήναι,
δαιμόνιον πτολίεθρον !

Oh you, olive shiny and violet
crowned glorious Athens,
famous in songs,
rampart of Greece, divine city!
-Pindar

By this time next year, Athens will have completed the thirty-year restoration of its revered Acropolis. Ravaged by time, war, looters, a hapless restoration completed during the 1930s, and, most recently, Athenian smog, the structures atop the Acropolis have in recent decades undergone scrupulous study and stabilization. In the case of the diminutive Temple of Athena Nike, the structure was completely dismantled and rebuilt.

The hill’s centerpiece and Athens’ primary tourist attraction is the Parthenon, built by architects Ictinus and Callicrates in the 5th century B.C.E. during the height of the Periclean Golden Age. In spite of minor changes to the structure to accommodate new uses over the course of the centuries—it served as a church during the Byzantine era and then a mosque following the Ottoman conquest of Greece—the Parthenon survived largely intact until the Venetian siege of Athens in 1687. During the struggle, a Venetian shell lobbed from Philopappou Hill scored a direct hit and blew up the gunpowder magazine housed in the structure as part of the Ottoman garrison on the Acropolis. The explosion left a ruin that was substantially less intact than what is there today (see photo).

Following the siege, the resulting disarray of the site rendered it vulnerable to hundreds of looters, the most famous of whom, Thomas Bruce—the 7th Earl of Elgin and the British ambassador to the Ottoman Empire during the early 19th century—removed a large portion of the sculptures, including those contained in the pediments as well as large sections of the frieze. These now infamous “Elgin Marbles” are housed in the British Museum. For more than a century Greece has been clamoring for their return.

Early attempts at restoration began in 1834 immediately after the foundation of the modern Greek state and continued sporadically throughout the 19th century. However, it wasn’t until the 20th century that a substantial and ultimately disastrous restoration of the Acropolis structures was undertaken by Nicholas Balanos between 1923 and the onset of World War II. Having just suffered a catastrophic military defeat at the hands of Atatürk’s Turkish nationalist forces in Asia Minor and with Athens and neighboring Piraeus teeming with more than a million Anatolian refugees, Greece set about restoring the Acropolis as a way of reclaiming its glorious past and healing the nation’s wounds. The ambitious project, which attempted to stabilize the structures by cutting into the marble to insert iron clamps, caused enormous damage. The clamps subsequently rusted and expanded, cracking the fragile stones.

The current rehabilitation began in 1975, a year after the collapse of the military junta that had ruled Greece since 1967. Once again, a restoration of the Parthenon was begun in order to help the Greeks recover from a national trauma. Just like the original Parthenon symbolized the victory of democratic Athens over Persian tyranny, the 1975 rehabilitation project symbolized the revival of Athenian democracy, which had been compromised by nearly a decade of oppressive rule at the hands of the army’s colonels.

The current rehabilitation does not attempt to recreate the pre-1687 Parthenon. Much of the project has involved undoing Balanos’ botched restoration attempt. For example, the iron clamps have been removed and replaced with titanium rods. Not everyone is happy though. Some have argued that the rehabilitation has crossed the line into reconstruction, since new marble is being used to fill gaps and effect structural repairs. The project is making use of marble from Mount Pendeli, north of Athens, whose ancient quarries provided the original building material between 447 and 432 B.C.E.

I first visited the Acropolis in 1992 on Epiphany (January 6), during the height of the current rehabilitation. Amidst the scaffolding and even as a ruin, the Parthenon and the surrounding sculptures did not disappoint. In my mind I found myself reliving neo-classical public libraries, banks and schoolhouses, picket-fenced and neatly painted Greek Revival houses in tidy New England villages, Washington’s classically-inspired public monuments—they all converged on that one spot. They all evoke the Acropolis in some way or another, but what I did not expect was that the Acropolis would in turn evoke them.

As a child, I had heard stories from family members about the days back in the 1950s and 60s when visitors could roam the Acropolis freely and were allowed to enter the structures themselves. By the time I visited the site, many years had passed since tourists had been permitted to engage in such recklessness, and while I knew that the current rules were necessary to protect the structures from further deterioration, I found myself longing for the old days.

The turn-of-the-century postcard pictured above shows the Parthenon before restoration began in 1923.

Recommended Reading:
The Parthenon by Mary Beard