The Sad Tale of the Parthenon

The Parthenon was built by the ancient Athenians as a temple to Athena the patron goddess of their town. It was built on the rocky butte that housed the whole of the Acropolis; the administrative buildings of Athens. It took the better part of 2 decades to build, being completed in about 432 BC. It was not a temple in the traditional sense, but rather a building that honored the goddess.

It survived centuries of turmoil, from the Persian conquest, to the Spartan, to the Macedonian and the Roman. After the Romans there stood the Byzantines who made it into a church and altered is construction a little by adding a door and changing the front/side entrances. Tinally the Ottoman Turks took over Greece and made the building a Mosque The last to conquer it were the Turks.

Under the Turks it was turned into a mosque and thus it stood when the Frenchman Jacques Carrey came to it and drew sketches of it. From him we know the relative shape of the building in 1672, the state of the friezes etc. It was in pretty good shape for its thousand years.

But then the Turks used it as an ammo dump in their war with Venice. A stray mortar round struck the gun powder magazine and blew the structure's center out and knocked one of the walls completely down.

Thus the Parthenon became a ruin.