Parthenon
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- UNESCO World Heritage
Interesting facts
- On 26 September 1687 a Venetian mortar round hit gunpowder stored inside by the Ottoman garrison, and the blast killed about 300 people.
- The 1687 explosion brought down six columns on the south side and eight on the north, along with about three-fifths of the frieze sculptures.
- For roughly a thousand years the temple served as a church of the Virgin Mary, and before 1500 it had become a mosque.
- The gold-and-ivory statue of Athena inside was dedicated around 438 BCE, and Pericles reportedly said it held forty talents of pure gold.
- The name comes from the Greek parthenos, maiden, a reference to the virgin goddess Athena.
- The outer colonnade has eight columns at each end and seventeen along each side, all of marble from nearby Mount Pentelicus.
- Its frieze carried 92 carved metopes: fourteen on each end and thirty-two along each long side.
- Many of its proportions, from the facade to the column spacing, follow a 4:9 ratio.
- The building had already suffered a major fire in the third century AD, long before the gunpowder explosion.
- Large-scale restoration of the temple has been under way continuously since 1975.
Why it is worth it
The Parthenon looks perfectly straight only because almost nothing about it actually is. The platform it stands on curves gently upward toward the centre โ rising about 10 centimetres over a 70-metre side, a ratio of roughly 1 in 700 โ every column bulges very slightly partway up its height (a refinement called entasis) instead of tapering in a straight line, and the columns themselves lean fractionally inward rather than standing truly vertical. None of these corrections is visible to the eye on its own; together they're generally understood to counteract optical effects that would otherwise make a building built with mathematically straight lines look subtly warped or sagging. It's worth noting the point isn't universally settled โ a 2025 study argued that some of these "corrections" may not be deliberate optical compensation at all, just structural or practical choices reinterpreted after the fact โ so even the building's most celebrated trick is still being argued over by people who study it for a living.
Whatever the explanation, the speed of construction is not in dispute: the temple went up in about fifteen years, from 447 to 432 BCE, under the architects Ictinus and Callicrates with the sculptor Phidias overseeing the decorative program, during the same burst of Athenian building under Pericles that reshaped the whole Acropolis.
What you see on the hill today is missing a large share of what Phidias's team actually carved. Between 1801 and 1812, Thomas Bruce, the 7th Earl of Elgin, removed a substantial portion of the surviving sculptural decoration and shipped it to Britain, where it remains in the British Museum โ a removal that Greece has spent decades formally disputing, and that's still unresolved.
Getting there
Located in Athens. Athens Eleftherios Venizelos International Airport (ATH) is about 20 km away.
Plan your visit
We have no confirmed visit data yet. Once it is confirmed, this block also carries the date it was checked.
Nearby places
- Odeon of Herodes Atticus 0.2 km ยท roman-theatre
- Temple of Hephaestus 0.6 km ยท ruins
- Artemision Bronze 2.0 km ยท sculpture
- Daphni Monastery 9.2 km ยท monastery
On these lists
From the encyclopaedia
The Parthenon is a former temple on the Athenian Acropolis, Greece, that was dedicated to the goddess Athena. Its decorative sculptures are considered some of the high points of classical Greek art, and the Parthenon is considered an enduring symbol of ancient Greece, Western civilisation, and democracy.
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