Acropolis

The Athenian Acropolis

In the Late Bronze Age, the Mycenaeans fortified the hilltop. The huge blocks of their defense walls survive in a few places. A royal palace is assumed to have existed, but evidence is scanty. Circa 1200 BC, a cleft in the rock of the north slope, a vertical cavity 30 meters (98 feet) deep, was turned into a protected water supply for those inside the citadel. [Page 2]Steps were installed from the top, and a deep well was dug at the bottom. After only 25 years the lower part of this “fountain house” collapsed; the shaft was then used as a garbage dump.

Erechtheum, Acropolis of Athens

Source: Vasilis Gavrilis.

By the Classical period, the Acropolis had become the main religious center of Athens. The buildings of the mid- to late fifth century BC, the high point of Athenian power, are the best known: the Parthenon (the temple of Athena Parthenos), the Erechtheion (a temple-shrine sheltering several cults), the Temple of Athena Nike, and the Propylaia, the ingenious entrance gate. In between these and other buildings, statues and other offerings left by the pious filled the hilltop. The slopes of the Acropolis were utilized for theaters (the Theater of Dionysos and, added in Roman times, the Odeion of Herodes Atticus) and a variety of shrines and monuments.

In medieval and early modern times, as the population of Athens declined, the city retreated to the Acropolis and its north slope. A church was installed inside the Parthenon; in Ottoman times, the church was replaced with a mosque. The hilltop was fortified once again. Franks converted the Propylaia into a castle; Ottomans used the Parthenon for storage of gunpowder (exploded by Venetian artillery in 1687). Modest houses densely filled the spaces between the reused Classical buildings.

In the 1830s, when Athens became the capital of newly independent Greece, the Acropolis was radically altered. The hilltop promptly became an archaeological site. Postclassical constructions were stripped away in order to expose the buildings of the fifth century BC. The Acropolis, now turned into an expression of the glory of ancient Greece, would become a symbol of the new nation. This symbolism continues today. The Athenian Acropolis is Greece's premier tourist destination, and both by day and, floodlit, by night, the Parthenon dominates the skyline of central Athens.

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