The Parthenon

The Building

The Parthenon is the most important and famous monument of Athens Acropolis and even of all the Ancient Greek civilization. The temple is dedicated to Athena Parthenos (the virgin), the patron goddess of Athens and the name “Parthenon” means “virgin’s apartment”. The temple is located on the highest part of the Acropolis. It was designed by the architect Iktinos and Kallikrates and was built between 447 and 432 B.C. during the Periclean project. The supervisor of the whole work was Pheidias, the famous Athenian sculptor. The temple is built in the Doric architectural style and in Pentelic marble.

The temple consisted of 8 Doric columns on each of the narrow sides and 17 columns on each of the long sides. The lines of the temple were curved in a special way in order to give an optical illusion that gives the impression that the foundations are straight.

The central part of the temple, in front of a pool of water, stood a 40 foot ivory and gold statue of Athena.

The Decorations

The decorations of the Parthenon are considered as unique masterpieces. It is a combination of the Doric metopes and the Ionic frieze on the walls of the cella.

The metopes, on the east side, depict the Olympian gods fighting against the giants, on the west side, the Lapiths battle the centaurs, on the east side, the triumph of the Greeks over the Amazons while the north side depict the triumph of the Athenians over the Trojans.

The relief frieze runs along the four sides of the temple and depicts the Procession of the Panathenaea, the most important religious festival of ancient Athens. The frieze includes figure of gods, beasts and some 360 humans.

The two pediments of the temple represented major mythological scenes: the east pediment represents the birth of Athena and the west pediment, the fight that took place between Athena and Poseidon for the name of the city.

The Parthenon was the victim of many transformations, depending of what civilization was ruling the city. The final destruction took place in the beginning of the 19th century when the British ambassador in Constantinople, Lord Elgin, stole the decorations of the Parthenon and sold them to the British Museum where they are still exhibited.

The Parthenon

The Parthenon. It is the most important and characteristic monument of the ancient Greek civilization and still remains its international symbol. It was dedicated to Athena Parthenos, the patron goddess of Athens. It was built between 447 and 438 B.C. and its sculptural decoration was completed in 432 B.C. The construction of the monument was initiated by Perikles, the supervisor of the whole work was Pheidias, the famous Athenian sculptor, while Iktinos and Kallikrates were the architects of the building. The temple is built in the Doric order and almost exclusively of Pentelic marble. It is peripteral, with eight columns on each of the narrow sides and seventeen columns on each of the long ones. The central part of the temple, called the cella, sheltered the famous chryselephantine cult statue of Athena, made by Pheidias.
The sculptural decoration of the Parthenon is a unique combination of the Doric metopes and triglyphs on the entablature, and the Ionic frieze on the walls of the cella. The metopes depict the Gigantomachy on the east side, the Amazonomachy on the west, the Centauromachy on the south, and scenes from the Trojan War on the north.
The relief frieze depicts the Procession of the Panathenaea, the most formal religious festival of ancient Athens. The scene runs along all the four sides of the building and includes the figures of gods, beasts and of some 360 humans.
The two pediments of the temple are decorated with mythological scenes: the east, above the building’s main entrance, shows the birth of Athena, and the west, the fight between Athena and Poseidon for the name of the city of Athens. The Parthenon retained its religious character in the following centuries and was converted into a Byzantine church, a Latin church and a Muslim mosque.
The Turks used the Parthenon as a powder magazine when the Venetians, under Admiral Morosini, sieged the Acropolis in 1687. One of the Venetian bombs fell on the Parthenon and caused a tremendous explosion that destroyed a great part of the monument which had been preserved in a good condition until then.
The disaster was completed in the beginning of the 19th century, when the British ambassador in Constantinople, Lord Elgin, stole the greatest part of the sculptural decoration of the monument (frieze, metopes, pediments), transferred them to England and sold them to the British Museum, where they are still exhibited, being one of the most significant collections of the museum.

Parthenon - Athens, Greece

With the exception of the Great Pyramid in Egypt, the Parthenon of Athens has probably received more attention from archaeologists, historians, architects, painters and poets than any other structure on earth. Words and photographs however, can offer but slight tribute to this extraordinary creation. It is the supreme expression of the ancient Greek architectural genius. With its incomparable setting, the visual harmony deriving from its sacred geometry, and the enduring wisdom of its resident deity, the goddess Athena, the Parthenon exercises a profound and lasting effect upon the human soul. The current author has visited the Parthenon numerous times since he was a young boy and honors the site as having had a major influence on his style of photographic composition. The architectural form of the temple of Athena represents the quintessential marriage of simplicity and power, and the photographs in this book are an expression of gratitude for a lesson so wondrously taught.

Similar to many other holy places featured in this web site, the origins of the sacred use of the great limestone rock rising from the Attic plain are unknown to us. They were forgotten long before the writing of the first recorded histories of Athens. Neolithic remains discovered on the slopes of the Acropolis indicate a continuous settlement on the hill from at least 2800BC, well before the Minoan and Mycenaean cultures that later gave birth to the archaic Greek. In the Mycenaean period (1600-1100 BC) the summit was surrounded by a massive fortification wall, which protected the palace-temple of the Mycenaean priest-kings. The earliest known Hellenistic structures, dating from the 6th century BC, were two large temples dedicated to Athena, on hill top positions which had probably contained older shrines before them. In 480 BC the Persians destroyed these temples and in 447 BC (some sources say 438 BC) the Athenian leader Pericles initiated construction of the presently standing temple of Athena.

Built by the architects Ictinus and Callicrates under the supervision of the sculptor Phidias, the temple is generally considered to be the culmination of the development of the Doric order, the simplest of the three classical Greek architectural styles. The rectangular building (measured at the top step of its base to be 101.34 feet wide by 228.14 feet long) was constructed of brilliant white marble, surrounded by 46 great columns, roofed with tiles, and housed a nearly 40 foot tall statue of the goddess Athena. The statue, known as Athena Promachos, Athena the Champion, was made of wood, gold and ivory and could be seen from a distance of many miles.

While much of the structure remains intact, the Parthenon has suffered considerable damage over the centuries. In 296 BC the gold from the statue was removed by the tyrant Lachares to pay his army; in the 5th century AD the temple was converted into a Christian church; in 1460 it housed a Turkish mosque; in 1687 gun-powder stored by the Turks inside the temple exploded and destroyed the central area; and in 1801-1803 much of the remaining sculpture was sold by the Turks (who controlled Greece at the time) to the Englishman Lord Elgin, who roughly removed the sculptures and sold them to the British Museum. Today, the automobile exhausts, industrial pollution, and acid rain of Athens are rapidly destroying the few remaining sculptures of this once great work of art.

A substantial admission price is paid by the hundreds of thousands of tourists who visit the site each year. Little of this money however, is used for the preservation of the Parthenon but is instead wasted away by corrupt bureaucrats and government officials.

The name Parthenon refers to the worship of Athena Parthenos, the ‘Virgin Athena’ who issued fully grown from the head of her father Zeus. The maiden goddess and patroness of Athens, she represents the highest order of spiritual development and the gifts of intellect and understanding. Pure in body, mind and heart, Athena is the symbol of the universal human aspiration for wisdom. It was not only the character and statue of the goddess that symbolized these qualities however, but also the precise topographical location and astronomical orientation of her shrine, and the sacred geometry that infused the entire temple. Though a discussion of these matters is too long to offer in this section, let us read a few passages from Vincent Scully, one of the more enlightened scholars studying Greek sacred architecture.

“The historic Greeks partly inherited and partly developed an eye for certain surprisingly specific combinations of landscape features as expressive of particular holiness. This came about because of a religious tradition in which the land was not a picture but a true force which physically embodied the powers that ruled the world……All Greek architecture explores and praises the character of a god or group of gods in a specific place. That place is itself holy and, before the temple was built upon it, embodied the whole of the deity as a recognized natural force. With the coming of the temple, housing its image within it and itself developed as a sculptural embodiment of the god’s presence and character, the meaning becomes double, both of the deity in nature and the god as imagined by men. Therefore, the formal elements of any Greek sanctuary are, first, the specifically sacred landscape in which it is set and, second, the buildings that are placed within it…….We must now go further to recognize that, not only were certain landscapes indeed regarded by the Greeks as holy and as expressive of specific gods, or rather as embodiments of their presence, but also that the temples and the subsidiary buildings of their sanctuaries were so formed in themselves and so placed in relation to the landscape and to each other as to enhance, develop, complement, and sometimes even to contradict, the basic meaning that was felt in the land.”

Francis Penrose, a British archaeologist studying the Parthenon in 1891, suggested that the site is oriented towards the rising of the Pleiades in the constellation of Taurus.

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