Athens - Acropolis

(Local Name: Akrópoli) A great crag of limestone rising out of the plain of Attica offered a site well adapted for the Acropolis, the fortified citadel of Athens. At first it served both as the stronghold of the kings of Athens and as the site of the city's oldest shrines; later it was reserved for the service of the divinities of Athens alone.

This religious center of ancient Athens, which received its classical form in the time of Pericles, thus reflected the humane values of Greek culture and thoughts which have retained their power down to our own day. In spite of the destruction wrought by many centuries, most notably the devastating explosion in 1687, when a Venetian grenade blew up a Turkish powder magazine which had been housed in the Parthenon and made the 2,000-year-old temple a ruin, the surviving remains still convey something of the splendor of the age of Pericles. During the 19th and early 20th centuries the removal of post-classical structures and extensive works of restoration revealed the remains of the classical buildings of the fifth century B.C. This process began in 1836, immediately after the liberation from Turkish rule, with the restoration (by Ludwig Ross, a German archeologist on King Otto's staff) of the temple of Athena Nike, which had been incorporated in a Turkish bastion, and culminated in the re-erection of the columns on the north side of the Parthenon in the 1920s.

But the 20th century has also contrived to wreak more destruction than the Acropolis had suffered in the preceding two-and-a-half millennia. The fumes and pollution created by the swarming population and constant traffic of a great modern city, the damage caused by the landing and taking off of aircraft (which are now forbidden to overfly the Acropolis), and the three million visitors who climb up to the Acropolis every year have worn down the surface of the rock and the marble facing of the monuments, while the marble itself has suffered chemical change and the surviving classical sculpture (e.g. on the west frieze of the Parthenon) is flaking away - all this at an alarming pace and on a disturbing scale.

Accordingly UNESCO set up a $15million program to save the Acropolis. The first steps have been to lay a wooden gangway through the Propylaia and to exclude the public from the structures flanking the Propylaia and the interior of the Parthenon. The caryatids have been removed from the Erechtheion - swathed during this process in scaffolding - and placed in the Acropolis Museum, where they can be protected from further damage. How far the measures already taken and the others which are planned will contribute to the preservation of this incomparable monument of antiquity is, however, still an open question.

The Acropolis crag measures 320m/350yd from east to west and 156m/170yd from north to south and rises to 156.2m/512ft at its highest point. It falls steeply down on the north, east and south, so that since the earliest times the only access has been from the west.

In the Mycenaean period the "cyclopean" walls around the citadel closely followed the contours of the crag. In the north wall were two small gates leading down to the Klepsydra spring and the caves on the north face of the rock. The site of the later Old Temple of Athena was occupied by a royal palace, and there were dwelling houses to the east of the Erechtheion.

The Archaic period (seventh and sixth century B.C.) is represented by the remains of some 10 buildings and parts of two temples. All the buildings of the Archaic period were destroyed by the Persians in 480 B.C. During the reconstruction, which was begun immediately afterwards, Themistocles re-used column drums and fragments of entablature from the destroyed buildings, still to be seen in the north wall. Later, after 467 B.C., the south side of the defenses was altered by Kimon, who built the straight length of wall which still exists.

Inside the Themistoclean north wall and Kimon's south wall the ground surface was built up, using the remains of buildings and sculpture which had been destroyed or damaged by the Persians. In this "Persian rubble" excavations in 1885-86 brought to light numerous pieces of sculpture and architectural fragments which are now among the treasures of the Acropolis Museum.

Within the extended area of Kimon's stronghold Pericles carried out his great program of building and rebuilding: in 447-438 B.C. the Parthenon; in 437-432 B.C. the Propylaia; in 432-421 B.C. the temple of Athena Nike; in 421-406 B.C. the Erechtheion. The only remains dating from a later period are those of a circular temple dedicated to Rome and Augustus (early Imperial period) outside the east end of the Parthenon.