The ancient Greeks built hundreds of temples, but today only a few have survived in good shape. And none of them have their ancient roof. But did you know that the Parthenon had a good chance of surviving fully intact?
Complete with its roof. It would have been the only one in the world, if it wasn't for a massive explosion that destroyed much of it. So what exactly happened to the Parthenon?
And when was this explosion? This is not going to be your typical Parthenon video, as I won't be focusing onn the classical period, because everyone else already has. What I do want to tell you, is the part of the story that most people don't know, about how it survived for so many centuries, and about its dramatic destruction.
Now, if you’re just here for epic explosions, then skip ahead to the 10 minute mark. But it’ll make a lot more sense if you watch the full video. So let’s start with a few basic facts.
The Parthenon was completed in 432 B. C. during the golden age of classical Athens.
It was a temple to Athena, the goddess of the city, and was a masterpiece of the sculptor Phidias. A jewel on top of the Acropolis. It gleaming Pentellic marble could be seen from miles away.
What made the Parthenon unique was the sheer amount of time it remained so well-preserved, with an ancient roof. All the way to the 1600’s. No other temple did this.
I’ve made another video about why no Greek temple has a roof anymore. But the main reason is because they were all made of wood. This included the Parthenon, which had marble tiles covering the wooden roof.
But as you know, wood decays, rots, and can catch on fire. You always hear in history about temples burning. But how can a building made of stone burn?
Well it was the roof that went up in flames. Wooden roofs just don’t last the test of time. But what's amazing is that the Parthenon’s roof did last.
Well, not quite the original roof, but almost. Allow me to explain. The original classical roof lasted for almost 700 years, until late antiquity.
That was when the Roman Empire, of which Greece was now a part of, started being invaded by all sorts of barbarian tribes. In 267 AD, a tribe called the Heruli invaded Greece, and sacked Athens. They destroyed much of the city.
And guess what they did to the Parthenon? There goes that wooden roof again. The traditional theory is that after that, the Parthenon had no roof for a century.
Until 363 AD, when the last pagan emperor named Julian, built a new one. It was smaller and didn't cover the entire building. Just the cella, which was the inner room that housed the statue of Athena.
And instead of marble tiles, they were from terracotta. So it was not nearly as impressive as the original one, but at least it had a roof again. There's also new theory that shortly after the destruction, It was the Athenians themselves who appealed to the Roman Senate for financial help.
The city was in ruins and needed much repair. So maybe a big wide roof was not a priority, and a small one was good enough, as long as it protected the cella and the statue of Athena. Either way, the most important thing you need to know, is that this new roof lasted for a really long time.
Up to 1400 years. Twice as long as the original classical roof. So how did it last so long?
Well as you know, Paganism was on its way out, and Christianity would soon take over. The Christian Roman emperors ordered to shut down and destroy many pagan temples. because they wanted to impose Christianity, and wipe Paganism off the face of the earth.
That's what happened to the Temple of Artemis, which completely disappeared. The great statue of Athena, which stood inside the Parthenon for centuries, was looted by one of the Christian emperors, and taken to Constantinople, where it disappeared forever. But for some reason, the Parthenon was spared from getting destroyed, and was converted into a church in the 500’s.
It was dedicated to the Virgin Mary, which is interesting because Athena was also a virgin goddess. In fact the great statue by Phidias, was called Athena the Virgin, which in Greek is something like Athena Parthenos. This is what gave the building its name.
I don’t think it's a coincidence that the Christians chose that continuity, and dedicated the church to another virgin goddess. But the church was a blessing for the Parthenon, because it preserved it. It meant that it would continue being used as a building.
So any maintenance work it needed would have been tended to, especially the roof. And for the most part, it remained like this for a very long time. It even became a Catholic church in the 1200’s, when Greece was occupied by Western Europeans after the 4th Crusade.
The Catholics added a bell tower, which personally I think really doesn't work on a classical Greek temple. And what's up with those cubes they built in front? They really butchered the look.
But what counted is that this continuation as a religious building, kept on preserving it. In total, it was a church for almost 1000 years, which is such a long time, that people forgot that it was ever a pagan temple. Maybe some locals never forgot.
But for the most part, it was just known as the Church of the Virgin Mary. The identity of the Parthenon was lost from public consciousness for a very long time, until the Renaissance. That was when Western Europe was rediscovering the classical world again.
And in 1436, an Italian scholar named Syriacus of Ancona, went ot Athens and sketched the Parthenon. I have to show you what he wrote because this is really interesting. Here he writes in Latin, marble temple, Marmoreum Templum.
And then he mentions Phidias, the legendary architect of the Parthenon. And here he writes, divae - goddess and Palladis, the Latin name for Athena. So the marble temple of the goddess Athena.
This is amazing because after centuries of being forgotten, this is the first documented identification of the Parthenon for what it was. This knowledge was always somewhere, but he may have been the first Non-Greek to connect those dots. However, we're still in the Renaissance, so this rediscovery remained only in academic circles, and did not become widely known until later.
20 years after his visit to Athens, The Ottoman Empire, which was expanding into Greece, took Athens in 1458, just 5 years after they conquered Constantinople. and they turned the church into a mosque. Instead of the bell tower, they built a minaret.
but a minaret on a classical Greek temple? ! ?
But again, what mattered is that the mosque continued doing the same thing, preserving the Parthenon. And its roof would continue to survive even longer, into the 1600’s. What’s fascinating is that we actually have historical drawings of the Parthenon from the 1600’s, with its roof.
This painting from 1674 focuses on the people in the foreground. The Parthenon is just a passive detail in the background. But if you look closely, you can see the roof, as well as the minaret.
This one's amazing. Yeah that's not the original classical roof, but it's still an ancient roof that was 1400 years old by this point. And another sketch by a less talented Italian artist, dated to 1686.
Notice that the Acropolis is labeled, cittadella in Italian, citadel. and the Parthenon is labeled, Gran Moschea, Great Mosque. This shows that the building's true identity was still not entirely clear, even as late as 1686.
I can just imagine that Italian asking the locals what the building was called, and they simply told him, the mosque. But it would be really interesting to know how many people at the time actually knew what the building really was. I believe that if it survived this long and nothing else happened, that there's a good chance it would have made it until today.
It just needed to last for 3 more centuries, and we'd have a whole Parthenon today, complete with an ancient roof. But something did happen, just a year later. In 1687, the Ottomans were at war with Venice, a powerful maritime republic, in what's known as the Morean War.
Both powers controlled different parts of Greece, so this was just another standard war for territorial control. And Greece was the pawn that was being tossed around between them. On September 21st, 1687, the Venetians arrived in Athens.
The Ottomans were outnumbered, so they evacuated the city and retreated up to the Acropolis, where they garrisoned themselves until reinforcements could arrive. The Venetians set up cannon and mortar batteries on the hills around the Acropolis, and the siege began. Meanwhile on the Acropolis, The Ottomans were busy fortifying themselves in.
They stored gunpowder inside the Propylaea, the gateway to the Acropolis. But their worst crime, was storing ammunition and gunpowder inside the Parthenon itself. They put it in the cella, that inner room that used to house the statue of Athena.
How did they think this was going to end? A few days into the siege, a Venetian cannon ball hit the Propylaea, and the gunpowder magazine exploded. Then on the evening of the 26th, a Venetian crew stationed on the Philopappos Hill, shot a single shell aimed right at the Parthenon.
The shell hit it smack on. it went through the ancient roof, and detonated the gunpowder. The massive explosion destroyed the walls of the cella, tumbled over columns, blew off sculptures, and the entire roof collapsed.
This ancient wooden roof that had made it for 1400 years. And a temple that survived intact for over 2100 years, were destroyed in an instant. This dramatic event was later recreated in these historical sketches that show the arc of the shell, and the ensuing explosion.
So now there are some questions. Why did the Ottomans keep gunpowder inside it? And did the Venetians know about it?
There have been speculations that the Ottomans stored it there because they assumed that the Venetians would never dare target such a beautiful ancient treasure. If that's true, then it would suggest that the Ottomans knew what the building really was, and the value that it had. But then they made a huge assumption that the Venetians would also know, or even care.
The commander of the Venetian forces, Francesco Morosini, described it as a “miraculous shot”. which shows that he wanted to target the Parthenon. At the very least, it shows that he took pleasure at what happened.
Barbarian He then ordered to remove statues from the Parthenon in order to take them back to Venice, and when the ropes snapped, ended up dropping some of them to the ground, smashing them into pieces. In the end, the Venetians only held Athens for 6 months. Then the Ottomans took it back.
So all this destruction for nothing. Today much of the Parthenon is reconstructed. The columns on the north side were built up again.
So some of its original form was salvaged. But the south side still shows the gaping hole caused by the blast. But to really get a good sense for the scale of the destruction, these historical paintings show the real aftermath, in the years that followed.
The Ottomans picked up the rubble, and used it to build a mosque right in the middle of it. Which tells me that they didn't feel remorse for what happened. This complete Greek temple, was hollowed out completely.
The cella and roof gone! And only half the columns still standing. And the tragedy doesn't even end here.
114 years later, another barbarian showed up. A Scottish aristocrat named Lord Elgin, who was the British ambassador to the Ottomans. He got permission from the Ottomans to only study the sculptures, but ended up taking them for himself.
He hired local men to extract them one by one, and lowered them with ropes. In the process, he robbed the Parthenon of half the sculptures that were still left on it since the explosion. He shipped them back to Britain, and then when he got into financial troubles and a costly divorce, sold them to the British government in order to cover his debts.
He used these priceless treasures to pay for his personal legal expenses. Today they're housed in the British Museum. The Greek government has been trying to get them back for ages, and rightfully so, but without success.
This is my own theory. . .
but I believe that if the Parthenon was still a complete building by the time Elgin laid his eyes on it, that he wouldn't have had the nerves to help himself to the sculptures. Once something is a cadaver, the vultures come and pick away at it. And so this was the tragic fate of our beloved Parthenon.
An artistic masterpiece, and one of the most epic Greek temples ever built. It could have been the only one in the world to have survived intact, if it wasn't for human recklessness, carelessness, and greed. Today's millions of tourists who visit it, marvel at its glory, most of them not knowing, that it could have been even more magnificent.
