{"id":800,"date":"2019-11-12T22:20:31","date_gmt":"2019-11-13T03:20:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.hsc.edu\/drjclassics\/?page_id=800"},"modified":"2026-07-31T00:26:32","modified_gmt":"2026-07-31T00:26:32","slug":"road-to-the-recovery-of-ancient-buildings","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/blogs.hsc.edu\/drjclassics\/illustrated-lectures\/road-to-the-recovery-of-ancient-buildings\/","title":{"rendered":"Road to the Recovery of Ancient Buildings"},"content":{"rendered":"\t\t
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How many of us are surprised, touring Greece, to find 5th century BC ruins still lying about for inspection despite 2,500 years of human history and natural process intervening? Ancient Greece has hardly been kept under a bell jar – it’s remarkable how much of this long-lost culture has survived given that the land has been continuously inhabited and developed since antiquity. Excavation and restoration programs have done wonders in the face of the natural and man-made changes wrought over two and a half millennia. Below is a brief introduction to the obstacles standing in the way of rediscovering the grandeur of these mute witnesses to history. Restoration in Progress The largest ongoing restoration effort concerns the Parthenon on the Acropolis in Athens, where cranes hoist newly hewn marble pieces into place to replace those lost to time, war, and treasure-seekers. The marble is quarried from the same source, Mt. Pendeli, that supplied the original building material between 447-432 BC – a nine-mile distance between quarry and building site that makes the ancient accomplishment all the more astonishing. Other buildings on the Acropolis, including the Temple of Athena Nike, have likewise been restored toward their fifth-century appearance. Acts of War In 1687, Venetian forces attacking the Turks garrisoned on the Acropolis struck an arsenal of gunpowder stored inside the Parthenon, blowing off its roof, destroying 28 columns and most of the interior cella, and starting a fire that burned for two days; cannonballs fired from nearby Philopappos Hill left further marks on the building. Natural Calamities Natural disasters have taken a toll across Greece as well. The Propylaia was severely damaged in 1645 when lightning struck a Turkish gunpowder store housed within it, and the Parthenon shifted an inch off its foundation during a 1981 earthquake. At the Temple of Olympian Zeus in Athens, one column collapsed during a violent 1852 rainstorm; at the Temple of Zeus in Olympia, an earthquake toppled columns into neat rows of drums, all that remains of the building that once housed the chryselephantine (gold and ivory) cult statue of Zeus, a Wonder of the Ancient World. Further back, a catastrophic volcanic eruption around 1450 BC buried the town of Akrotiri on Santorini under 150 feet of pumice – roughly 1,500 years before Vesuvius buried Pompeii and Herculaneum in similar fashion. Metal Harvesting The Hephaesteum in the Athenian Agora, the best-preserved Doric temple in mainland Greece, owes its survival to its early conversion into a Christian church (around AD 200). Even so, its iron structural clamps were harvested in medieval times to be melted down for weapons and ammunition, leaving chisel marks still visible along the temple’s foundation steps. Sacred Vandalism While the church’s use of the Hephaesteum preserved the building, its artwork fared worse. The temple’s metopes depict Theseus’ fight against the Minotaur (leading generations to mistakenly call the building the “Theseion”), but in every metope, Theseus has had his head chiseled away, while the monstrous Minotaur was left untouched – in the eyes of the church, apparently, being a pagan was worse than being a monster. Environmental Issues Earthquakes, storms, lightning, cannon fire, gunpowder explosions, and willful mutilation have all taken their toll on the Acropolis over the centuries – but more damage has occurred in the past fifty years than in the preceding two millennia combined, as air pollution from automobile exhaust literally eats away at Athens’ ancient marble. The Caryatids, marble columns carved in the shape of women that once supported the south porch of the Erechtheum, illustrate the point starkly: one was removed to England by Lord Elgin in the early 19th century and escaped this fate, while her five sisters left in place have worn down like melted wax, their detail eroded away; in 1979 they were moved into a nitrogen-filled case inside the Acropolis Museum, and the columns visible on the Erechtheum today are plaster replicas. Removal of Antiquities Lord Elgin removed far more than a single Caryatid from the Acropolis – the Parthenon sculptures now known as the Elgin Marbles, purchased by the British Museum in 1816, remain the most famous example (see our Parthenon Marbles page for more). Ancient sculpture was also frequently relocated by later conquerors rather than lost outright: in 86 BC, for instance, Sulla removed two Corinthian columns from the still-unfinished Temple of Olympian Zeus in Athens to help build the Temple of Jupiter on Rome’s Capitoline Hill. To reconstruct the Acropolis toward Pericles’ original vision, archaeologists today painstakingly collect and catalogue scattered fragments, piecing together what amounts to an enormous jigsaw puzzle – the restoration of the Propylaia alone involves an overwhelming number of marble fragments awaiting reassembly. Botched Past Restoration Attempts Modern conservators working on the Propylaia Restoration Project have also had to correct serious errors made during an earlier 20th-century restoration led by architect Nikolaos Balanos. Balanos left drilled lifting-holes in marble blocks open to the air, allowing water to pool and damage the stone, and used iron clamps (rather than the lead-coated iron the ancients themselves used) that later rusted, expanded, and cracked the surrounding marble. In one case, he even “reconstructed” a single Ionic column capital using marble fragments that actually belonged to four different original capitals. Today’s conservators must undo this earlier damage – replacing Balanos’ iron with titanium rods and properly filling old holes – before genuine restoration work can proceed.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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How many of us are surprised, touring Greece, to find 5th century BC ruins still lying about for inspection despite 2,500 years of human history and natural process intervening? Ancient Greece has hardly been kept under a bell jar – it’s remarkable how much of this long-lost culture has survived given that the land has […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":790,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"page-templates\/page_fullwidth.php","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-800","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.hsc.edu\/drjclassics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/800","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.hsc.edu\/drjclassics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.hsc.edu\/drjclassics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.hsc.edu\/drjclassics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.hsc.edu\/drjclassics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=800"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.hsc.edu\/drjclassics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/800\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1328,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.hsc.edu\/drjclassics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/800\/revisions\/1328"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.hsc.edu\/drjclassics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/790"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.hsc.edu\/drjclassics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=800"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}