The Acropolis stands above Athens on a limestone rock 157 metres high. The name comes from two Greek words: akron, the high point, and polis, the city. People have lived here since the Bronze Age, and the rock has been a sacred place for almost as long.
Almost everything you see today was built in a single period of about forty years.
The Persians burned the earlier sanctuary in 480 BC. After that, Pericles began a building programme that produced the Parthenon (447–438 BC, with its sculpture finished by 432), the great Propylaea gateway, the small Temple of Athena Nike, and the Erechtheion with its porch of Caryatids. Inside the Parthenon stood an enormous statue of Athena, made of gold and ivory, which has long since disappeared. The building was the city treasury as much as a temple.
What happened after antiquity
The Parthenon became a Christian church around the sixth century, and then a mosque after the Ottoman conquest of 1458. Through all of this it stayed almost complete, with its roof and sculpture still in place.
On 26 September 1687, during a Venetian siege, a mortar shell hit the gunpowder that the Ottoman garrison had stored inside. The explosion destroyed the centre of the building. The open shell you see today — columns standing, roof gone — is the result of that single evening.
A little over a century later, agents working for Lord Elgin removed about half of the surviving sculptures and shipped them to London. They are still in the British Museum.
Restoration
Work has continued without a break since 1975. The teams use new Pentelic marble, cut from the original ancient quarries, and they are also undoing the damage caused by earlier, cruder repairs.
The Caryatids on the Erechtheion are copies. The originals are three hundred metres downhill in the Acropolis Museum, together with the frieze, the pediments and the metopes.
