Over some 50 years, the Periclean building program produced not only the large temple to Athena Parthenos (“Athena the Virgin,” in Greek), but the Propylaea, the gateway to the Acropolis, as well as two smaller temples, the Erechtheion and the Temple of Athena Nike.

Around 490 B.C., the Athenians started building a majestic marble temple known as the Old Parthenon. By that time, the Bluebeard Temple had been demolished by the Persians. In 480 B.C., the Persians attacked again and burned, leveled and looted the Old Parthenon and almost every other structure at the Acropolis.

The building program of Pericles Among the buildings that would be constructed was the Propylaea (a new entrance building), a sanctuary to Athena Nike, a temple called the Erechtheion and of course, the Parthenon, an iconic temple dedicated to Athena, whose name means “the house [or temple] of the virgin goddess.”

Thomas Bruce

Greece maintains they were taken illegally during the country’s Turkish occupation and should be returned for display in Athens. The Greek government has disputed the British Museum Trustees’ legal title to the sculptures. Some suggest that Lord Elgin bribed Turkish officials and effectively stole the marbles.

In 1816, Parliament paid £350,000 for the Parthenon Marbles – most of which went to Elgin’s many creditors – and a new home was found at the British Museum, albeit initially in a shed.

“Since September 2003 when construction work for the Acropolis Museum began, Greece has systematically demanded the return of the sculptures on display in the British Museum because they are the product of theft,” the country’s culture minister Lina Mendoni told the Greek newspaper Ta Nea.

The quarry region is at Dionysos of Attica, at Dionyssovouni site, and has the same chemical composition and texture as the renowned since antiquity Pentelic marble. The Penteli quarries were the main source of marble not only for the construction of Parthenon and other buildings of the Acropolis.

Pentelic marble from the quarries at Penteli north of Athens is a fine-grained calcitic marble. Pentelic marble was used for most of the major monuments of Classical Athens, especially from the 5th century BC onwards and was the first white marble to be used in significant quantities at Rome, in the 2nd century BC.

The main building material was Pentelic marble quarried from the flanks of Mt. Pentelikon, located about 10 mi/ 16 km from Athens. (The old Parthenon, the one destroyed by the Persians while it was partway through construction was the first temple to use this kind of marble.)

Indeed, few cultural monuments demonstrate this more perfectly than the Athenian Parthenon, which was unceremoniously bombed in 1687 by a Venetian-led army of mercenaries hired by Poland, Venice, and the Vatican—the very Europeans whose culture it is meant to embody—to push the Ottoman Turks out of Europe.

Ictinus

Originally built for Tennessee’s 1897 Centennial Exposition, this replica of the Parthenon in Athens, Greece serves as a monument to what is considered the pinnacle of classical architecture. The Parthenon also serves as Nashville’s art museum.

The south slope of the Acropolis played a significant role in the artistic, intellectual and religious activity of ancient Athens. It was here, in the sunniest side of the hill, the Athenians established the principal shrine of Dionysus in Attica and most importantly the theatre where the ancient Greek drama was born.

The Cave of Apollo is thought to have been in use from the 13th century BC (Mycenaean period). Above is part of the north wall of the Acropolis near the Propylaia. Apollo was worshipped here as Patroos, a patrimonial god.

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Pericles