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The Parthenon was not worn away by time. It stood substantially intact for more than two thousand years, serving in turn as temple, church and mosque, and was wrecked in a single afternoon. On 26 September 1687 a Venetian mortar fired from a nearby hill struck the gunpowder the Ottoman garrison had stored inside it. Morosini called the shot fortunate. What visitors read as slow ancient decay is largely seventeenth-century artillery damage.
The fifth-century BC temple to Athena, and a building that has been continuously repurposed rather than abandoned. It served as a church and later as a mosque under Ottoman rule, with a minaret standing on the Acropolis. Its ruined state dates to one explosion in 1687, not to gradual collapse, which is why the damage reads as blown outward rather than fallen in.
The irregular temple on the north side of the Acropolis, its porch carried by six draped female figures. Those are copies. Five originals were moved indoors in 1978 to stop atmospheric damage, and a sixth has been in London since Elgin removed it. The building's odd asymmetric plan exists because it had to accommodate several older sacred spots at once.
The glass-floored museum below the hill, built to hold what came off it. Its top floor is aligned to the Parthenon and sized to the temple's exact dimensions, with gaps deliberately left where the pieces in the British Museum would sit. The empty spaces are the argument, and they are not subtle.
The civic and commercial centre of classical Athens, where the assembly's business, the law courts and the philosophers all overlapped. This, not the Acropolis, is where the democracy actually happened. The Temple of Hephaestus at its edge is the best-preserved Doric temple anywhere, and it survived by becoming a church.
A handful of enormous columns from a temple that took roughly seven centuries to finish, begun in the sixth century BC and completed under Hadrian. Fifteen columns stand of an original one hundred and four. One of the fallen ones lies where a storm dropped it in the nineteenth century, still articulated into its drums like a stack of coins.
The horseshoe stadium rebuilt in white Pentelic marble for the first modern Olympics in 1896, on the footprint of an ancient one. It is the only stadium in the world built entirely of marble. The shape is unforgiving: the turns are far tighter than a modern track, which made the 1896 running races genuinely awkward.
A pocket of whitewashed, blue-doored houses clinging to the north slope of the Acropolis, and visibly not Athenian. It was built in the nineteenth century by construction workers brought from the Cycladic island of Anafi, who put up the kind of houses they knew. A piece of the islands sits directly under the most famous ruin in Europe.
The ancient cemetery and potters' quarter, outside the old city walls because burials had to be. It is quiet, comparatively empty, and holds the Dipylon Gate where the Panathenaic procession began. The name is the root of the word ceramic, which is a rare case of a place naming a material rather than the other way round.
The old quarter below the Acropolis, and the part of Athens most visitors think of as the old town. Much of it is nineteenth-century rather than ancient, built after independence when Athens was a small town of a few thousand people being reinvented as a capital. Modern Athens is younger than the country's ruins suggest.
The steep cone rising above the city, higher than the Acropolis and largely ignored by visitors. It is the best place to grasp how Athens actually sits: a basin filled edge to edge with low concrete apartment blocks, ringed by mountains, with the Acropolis a small pale outcrop in the middle of it rather than the centre of anything.
The Parthenon was destroyed in one afternoon in 1687, not by time.
The Ottoman garrison stored gunpowder inside it during the siege of the Acropolis. A Venetian mortar round fired from the Hill of Philopappos on 26 September 1687 detonated the store, took off the roof, collapsed the cella and toppled columns.
The commander who blew it up called the shot fortunate.
Francesco Morosini described the hit in those terms because it killed more than three hundred Ottoman defenders and let Venice take the city. Venice then held Athens for barely a year before abandoning it to an approaching Turkish army.
There was a mosque inside the Parthenon.
After the Ottoman conquest the temple was converted, and a minaret stood on the Acropolis. Before that it had been a Christian church. The building spent far more of its life as a functioning place of worship for other religions than as a temple to Athena.
The women holding up the Erechtheion are copies, and one is in London.
Five original caryatids were moved to the Acropolis Museum in 1978 to protect them from pollution, with replicas installed on site. The sixth was taken by Elgin and remains in the British Museum, so the set has not been together for over two centuries.
The Acropolis Museum has deliberate gaps in its displays.
Its top gallery is oriented to the Parthenon and built to the temple's dimensions, with blank spaces left exactly where the sculptures held in London would go. The museum is a building-shaped argument for their return.
A Cycladic island village sits on the slope of the Acropolis.
Anafiotika was built in the nineteenth century by workers brought from the island of Anafi, who constructed the whitewashed, flat-roofed houses of their home islands directly beneath the Parthenon. It looks nothing like the rest of Athens because it is not from here.
The only all-marble stadium in the world hosted the first modern Olympics.
The Panathenaic Stadium was rebuilt in Pentelic marble on an ancient footprint for the 1896 Games. Its turns are far tighter than a modern track, which made the running events there distinctly harder than they would be today.
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