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Many of Athens’s bequests (all, if the theatre of Herodes Atticus may be regarded as an embodiment of the city’s literature) to the world are expressed in and around the natural centre of Athens, the Acropolis (designated a World Heritage site in 1987). Rising some 500 feet above sea level, with springs near the base and a single approach, the Acropolis was an obvious choice of citadel and sanctuary from earliest times. That it could be something more is evidenced in the Parthenon, one of the brightest jewels in humankind’s, let alone Athens’s, treasury.

As deceptively simple as Socrates’ conversation, this columned, oblong temple is the expression—without a trace of strain or conflict—of a human ideal of clarity and unity. The architectural genius is concentrated in the exterior, for within was a shelter for the goddess Athena—the patroness who lent her name to the city—not a place for mass worship. Its spiritual quality, the sensation of being almost afloat, is enhanced by the lack of a single straight vertical line in the peristyle (the surrounding colonnade); each vertical is almost imperceptibly bowed, theoretically meeting some 11,500 feet in the sky. The columns, of diminishing thickness toward the centre of the colonnade, with diminishing space between them, lean toward the centre, too; all these differences are virtually invisible to the beholder. Even the 20 flutings of each column diminish in width as they rise, and the humblest details of craftsmanship are perfect.

On the northeast corner of the interior are faint traces of Christian wall paintings dating from the temple’s service as the Church of St. Mary, and in the southwest corner of the porch is the stair leading to the minaret that was added when the building was a Turkish mosque. The Parthenon was also used as a powder magazine, when, on September 26, 1687, Venetian artillery, attacking the Turks from the Hill of the Muses, scored a direct hit. A member of the party with the field commander, General Königsmark, wrote, “How it dismayed His Excellency to destroy the beautiful temple which had existed three thousand years!” Conversely, Francesco Morosini, the commander in chief, when reporting to the Venetian government, called it “a fortunate shot.” Wishing to bring home more than just good news, he also tried to lower Athena’s horses in the centre of the west pediment, but his men’s dexterity was not as highly developed as their marksmanship, and the masterpieces were smashed to bits on the rock below.

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The Turks regained possession of the Acropolis the following year and later began selling souvenirs to Europeans. The duc de Choiseul, formerly French ambassador in Constantinople, picked up a piece of the frieze and two metopes. In 1801 the British ambassador, Lord Elgin, arrived with an imperial decree permitting him to pull down Turkish houses on the Acropolis to seek fragments of sculpture. Among the 50 pieces he took home (the shipping charges were £75,000, a huge sum for those days) was most of the remaining Parthenon sculpture, which he later sold to the British Museum for £35,000. The Greeks have forgiven the clumsiness of the Venetian engineers, the accuracy of Venetian cannoneers, and the vandalism of the Turks, but they still nurture rancour against Elgin. He also removed one of the caryatids from the Erechtheum, a temple of Athena called after a shrine dedicated to the legendary king Erechtheus or to Poseidon Erechtheus, but replaced it with a plaster cast. From London he sent a town clock for Athens, duly erected in the Agora and lost in the fire of 1885. The Erechtheum (5th century bce), which later became a church under the Byzantines and subsequently the Turkish commander’s harem, was originally dedicated to both Athena and Poseidon and was the most venerated of the Acropolis temples.

The Propylaea, the matchless entryway into the Acropolis, was the only opening in the surrounding wall. Just in front of it and to the left is the 27-foot-high pedestal for the thank offering to Agrippa, the victor of the Battle of Actium, who interceded for Athens, which had supported the loser, Mark Antony. To the right was the temple of Athena Nike (Giver of Victory), 27 feet long and 18 1/2 feet wide, which stood untouched until the Turks demolished it in 1686 to use the stones as defenses against the Venetians. In 1836 it was badly restored, and 100 years later its foundations began to slip into previously undiscovered Turkish cisterns, revealing the 6th-century foundations of Peisistratus’s earlier shrine to Artemis Epipyrgidea (Artemis on the Tower). The temple was then more accurately reconstructed. The northern wing of the Propylaea, the Pinakotheke, was used by the Frankish dukes, who reconstructed the interior to make a two-story building. In the 12th century Greek Orthodox bishops lived in the Pinakotheke, and in the 14th century the dynasty of Athenian dukes from Florence turned the Propylaea into a fortified castle with a Tuscan tower, which Heinrich Schliemann, the German excavator who discovered Troy, paid to have dismantled in 1875.

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When the Turks, who had occupied Athens since 1456, departed, they left the monuments in a state of ruin, the ground covered with garden plots, and several hundred small huts. After Greece won its independence, Otto, the first king of the Hellenes, had everything that postdated the Classical period swept away, set scholars to work identifying the remains, and encouraged some reconstruction.

According to Pausanias, the Greek traveller and geographer of the 2nd century ce, the colossal 30-foot-high bronze seated statue of Athena Promachos (Athena Who Fights in the Foremost Ranks), by the 5th-century-bce Athenian sculptor Phidias, was set up in the open behind the Propylaea, her gleaming helmet and spear visible to mariners off Cape Sunium (Soúnion) 30 miles away. The 6th-century Byzantine emperor Justinian carried the statue off to Constantinople (now Istanbul), just as Phidias’s ivory and gold statue of Athena had been taken from the Parthenon. Both of these masterpieces were lost to other looters in the Crusaders’ sack of Constantinople in 1204. Other statues stood in profusion amid small temples, such as the sculptor Myron’s group of Marsyas and Athena, his Perseus, and his heifer; Phidias’s Lemnian Athena and his Pericles; and a gigantic bronze effigy of the Trojan horse. There was an altar to Athena Hygeia (the Health Giver), a precinct sacred to the goddess Artemis Brauronia (named after a statue of her, brought from the town of Brauron), the Pandroseum (a building named after Pandrosos, a girl associated with Athena in legend), where the sacred olive tree of Athena grew, and, beyond the Parthenon, the great altar of Athena.

Less than 1,000 feet (300 metres) southeast of the Parthenon is the New Acropolis Museum, which was designed by Bernard Tschumi and opened in 2009. A dramatic glass and concrete structure, it has some 10 times the exhibition space of the old Acropolis Museum.

Other notable buildings

Below the Acropolis sanctuary, on the southwest slope of the hill, Herodes Atticus, a rich Roman, built a 5,000-seat odeum as a memorial to his wife in 161 ce. A conventional Roman theatre except that the semicircular auditorium was hollowed out of the rock, it was roofed in cedar and had a three-story facade of arches. Repaired but roofless, it is now used for the Athens summer festival of music and drama. A 300-yard-long portico stretching toward the Theatre of Dionysus had been built some 300 years earlier. The Dionysiac theatre itself, scooped out of the south slope early in the 5th century, replaced the Agora stage as the drama centre. It also replaced the Pnyx as the meeting place for the popular assembly. Rebuilt many times, the ruined theatre now visible is largely Roman, the last construction work on the stage probably dating from the early 3rd century ce. The Dionysia, the spring festival, which drew crowds from many parts of Greece and colonies in Asia Minor and Italy, was held in this theatre, which had 13,000 seats in 67 rows. The jury had larger front seats and the ecclesiastical dignitaries small stone thrones, on which their titles can still be read. Three tragic and four comic plays were presented in competition for the prize. Production costs were met by private sponsors who, when their choruses won the prize tripod, displayed it in an elaborate memorial in the Street of Tripods to the east of the theatre. The only one of these monuments still standing is that of Lysicrates, erected 334 bce, a small circular temple 21 1/2 feet high, its six columns an early example of the Corinthian order. The monument was preserved through incorporation into a convent (in which the English poet Lord Byron had a study) and influenced British Georgian and Regency architecture through the engravings of the Edinburgh artist “Athenian” Stuart. Farther east lay the Odeum of Pericles, and to the west are traces (420 bce) of the precinct of Asclepius, the god of healing, which took the form of a hospital portico for patients and temples decorated with votive reliefs.

On the Hill of Ares, the god of war, to the right of the descent from the Propylaea, a legendary jury of gods spared Ares from execution for the murder of the sea god Poseidon’s son. Trials for homicide continued to be heard on this hill through the ages, and the Supreme Court of Greece still bears the name.

Across Apostólou Pávlou (Apostle Paul Avenue) are the Hill of the Nymphs, where an Austro-Greek, Baron Sina, built an observatory in 1842; the Hill of the Muses, crowned with the remains of the marble monument to Philopappus, a Syrian who was Roman consul in the 2nd century ce; and the middle hill, the Pnyx (Tightly Crowded Together), the meeting place of the Ecclesia, the assembly of 18,000 citizens who heard the great Athenian orators. (In fact, attendance of more than 5,000 persons was rare at any gathering, but the Pnyx would still have been crowded.)