The Secret Lives of Buildings: From the Ruins of the Parthenon to the Vegas Strip in Thirteen Stories (4 page)

It was their leader, Pericles, who persuaded the Athenians to set their achievements in marble and to build a magnificent temple to Athene, so that her holy wisdom might be apprehended by the eye as well as the soul, the mind, and the ear. The temple was, like any other shrine, just a darkened chamber surrounded by a colonnade; but it possessed a splendor that set it apart from its rivals and predecessors. This splendor had nothing to do with size or expense. Rather, it resided in the proportion and the refinement of the architecture of the building, whose stones possessed the same undying youth and strength as the carved bodies that adorned it. There was not a single straight line in the Temple of Wisdom. The platform upon which it stood was built very slightly convex, so that it seemed to push upward from the earth. The columns of the peristyle were not simple cylinders, but were wider at the bottom than at the top, and subtly curved, as if they were flexing to support the architrave and the roof above them. They also leaned inward toward one another, so that if each column were extended upward it would meet all the others several miles above the center of the temple. The building was not even symmetrical, but tilted slightly toward the south, so that it might appear more imposing from the plain below the ramparts of the Acropolis.

The Temple of Wisdom was no mere building. The columns that
surrounded the inner sanctum were as vigorous and as beautifully proportioned as gods or heroes. Arranged in a phalanx guarding the goddess within, they were in such perfect harmony with one another that it might be said that they were themselves one body: that of the virgin Athene herself. And because the temple was the body of a divine virgin, it never aged. The historian Plutarch saw it some five hundred years after it had been built, yet even then he was moved to write, “There is a sort of bloom of newness upon these works . . . preserving them from the touch of time, as if they had some perennial spirit and undying vitality mingled in the composition of them.”

After he had shown his students the outside of the building, Proclus would lead them into the interior, which was known as the
hekatompedon
—the “hundred footer” shrine. Therein stood an image of Athene, over eighteen feet tall, made of gold and ivory. She wore a helmet, and brandished a shield and a spear, and held a winged figure of Victory in her hands.

This image of Athene, Proclus would say, was wrought by the sculptor Phidias, who was the friend of Pericles. One might imagine that, when he had finished it, he would have been honored by the Athenians for his artistry. But instead they accused him of stealing gold from the statue. He was flung into prison, where not even his friendship with Pericles could save him, and there he died. And so Athene was ravished a second time by the very man who had made her.

After he had taken them inside the temple, Proclus would bring his students outside again and show them the sculpted frieze that ran around the outer walls of the inner sanctum. This frieze depicted a procession of horsemen, officials with their staffs, and women bearing jars of water and oil. At the head of this procession was a child holding up a folded gown.

Once upon a time, Proclus said, a Macedonian warlord named Demetrius Poliorcetes—“the besieger of cities”—became the king of Athens. In order to honor him, the Athenians wove a great gown and embroidered it with scenes of all his victories. In accordance with annual custom, this gown was ceremonially carried in a procession to the Athene of Phidias. It was woven, like all the other gowns before it, by a group of young virgin women—the
parthenoi
—who inhabited their own space in the rear of the temple, a room that was named after
them and the goddess they served. Now, since they had no royal palace to give him, the Athenians invited Demetrius to take up residence in this
parthenon
, the room of the virgins, so that he could be close to the goddess who now wore the gown decorated with his triumphs.

But Demetrius was a barbarian despot who had at least four wives, countless mistresses, and a sexual appetite so voracious it was said that one young man jumped to his death in a cauldron of boiling water in order to escape his advances. And Demetrius’s gown, embroidered with his own image, turned out to be a dubious gift with a blasphemous price. You can imagine the way he had with the weaving virgins and their unfortunate goddess. Demetrius didn’t last long. His rival Lachares seized Athens from him and took up residence in the sanctuary of Athene; he stripped her image of its gold and cut it up in order to pay his barbarous soldiers.

Athene had been ravished many times, said Proclus, but somehow she remained the virgin goddess, enshrined in her virgin temple, perfect, beautiful, and unchanging. In the nine hundred years since it had first been built, the temple itself had acquired the name of her virginity: the Parthenon. The Romans, the Herulians, and the Visigoths had done many terrible things, Proclus said. They had reduced Athens to ashes, had enslaved her citizens, and had carried off many treasures, but they had left the Parthenon intact. The Roman emperor Nero was so captivated by the beauty of the temple that he adorned it with his name in bronze letters, and Alexander the Great gave the temple three hundred Persian shields in recompense for the three hundred Hellenes who had fallen at Thermopylae. “May it ever remain so,” Proclus would say; and he would conclude his lesson and return to his little house on the southern slope of the Acropolis, where he would meditate on the inviolate wisdom of Athene.

Then, in the year of Our Lord 391, Theodosius, the emperor of Constantinople, sent a proclamation throughout his empire: “No one is to go to the sanctuaries, walk through the temples, or raise his eyes to statues created by the labour of man.” He had the festival days of the old pagan gods declared as workdays, and the doors of the temples closed.

The Christians took possession of the Temple of Wisdom, and they turned it into a church. The
parthenon
, the room of the virgins at the
back of the building, became the front porch, and the
hekatompedon
the nave of the church. They blocked up the door to the
hekatompedon
and placed their altar there, and they opened a new door where Phidias’s image of Athene had been, so that the faithful who entered the church now shook the dust off their sandals onto the pavement where the goddess had stood. The temple, whose doors had opened to the east so that the light of the rising sun would come through its doors, now faced in the opposite direction, so that the altar of the Christians faced the dawn. In a final irony, the Christians named their new church Hagia Sophia, or Holy Wisdom.

A few decades later, the goddess of wisdom completed the Christians’ work for them. Athene appeared to Proclus in his dream and whispered an order into his ear. “Make your house ready,” she said; “they have turned me out of my temple, so now I come to live with you.” Proclus wept, and then he prepared himself. The goddess, it is said, went to live with him in his little house on the southern slopes of the Acropolis, and she was never seen again. Her empty image was removed from its sanctuary and shipped away to Constantinople by the emperor’s agents. And so the Parthenon, whose virgin goddess had been cast out of her own sanctuary, was ruined for the first time.

Eight hundred years later, the Christian rabble of Constantinople would tear an ancient statue to pieces because they were convinced it was the habitation of a demon. It was said that this statue stood over eighteen feet tall. She wore a helmet and held a shield and spear, and a winged figure of Victory fluttered in her hands.

1687

W
HEN IT WAS
some twenty-one centuries old, the Parthenon was ruined a second time. A Holy League of Christians descended on Athens, now a city in the Ottoman Empire, and laid siege to the Acropolis. Cannonballs rained onto the marble, and smoke blackened the sky and choked the air. Terrified, the harem of the Ottoman garrison, who were trapped on the rock, gathered their children about them and took refuge in what was now their mosque. Holed up in the shadows as the cannonade rumbled and cracked outside, the women told their children stories to reassure them.

One woman recounted tales from the Turkish traveler Evliya Çelebi. This mosque had been built as a madrassa by the wise man Plato long ago, she said, and he had delivered his lectures from the throne now used by the imam at prayer time. He had dwelled here with the goddess Athene, to whom he used to pray for wisdom. The mosque had been standing here for many thousands of years, the woman told her children, and it was not about to fall down now.

This Plato had constructed the mihrab, the niche pointing toward Mecca, in sheets of alabaster, which glowed even now in the darkness of the bombardment. The women pointed at the niche: “See, it glows still; Allah has not deserted us yet.” Plato had taken the bronze gates of Troy and had made them into the doors of his Academy. “The gates of Troy, which were never breached except by treachery, will keep us safe and sound,” said the women.

A Christian woman of the harem recounted tales from another traveler, the Italian Niccolò Martoni. Plato had lived long before the time of Jesus, let alone the prophet Muhammad, she said, and in those days many came to study the arts of wisdom in this building. One day, a young student called Dionysius was standing in the porch when the sky went dark and the earth began to tremble. This young Dionysius felt that some event of great significance was happening. Something moved him, and he turned to the mighty column next to which he was standing. With his knife, he carved an emblem into the marble: a cross. And the day on which he carved it, the Christian woman of the harem said, was the very day on which Jesus Christ was crucified for all our sins; and she crossed herself.

Later, when the Christians came and converted the building into a church, they repeated the little vandalism of Dionysius again and again. They worked their way around the friezes of sculpture, and they hacked off the heads and faces of the horsemen, the officials, the women bearing jars of oil and water, and the small child who carried the sacred gown; these were pagan idols and the habitation of demons. Just one sculpture—a pair of robed women, one seated and one standing—was left alone by the Christians, because they imagined that it represented the Annunciation. Centuries passed, and every passing archbishop cut his name into the marble walls, just as Dionysius had once carved his cross. In those days, the woman said, this darkened hall had been
gorgeous with golden mosaic, clouded with incense, ringing with bells and chanting. There had been an icon of Our Lady that had been painted from life by Saint Luke himself, a copy of the gospels that had been transcribed by Saint Helena, the head of Saint Makarios, the arms of Saint Dionysios, Saint Cyprian, and Saint Justin, and the elbow of Saint Maccabeus.

When the Christian woman had finished speaking, her Muslim sister picked up the story. Not so very long ago, she said, when the Roman Empire of the Christians finally fell to the forces of the prophet, the church had been turned into a mosque. The sultan Mehmet had come to see the place and had marveled at its beauty. As the Christians had done before them, the people of the prophet excised from their temple the idolatrous images they found, and the gruesome frescoes of the Last Judgment disappeared under whitewash. There was just one image that they did not dare to remove, a mosaic of the Virgin Mary in the vault of the mihrab. Once upon a time, a soldier had taken a shot at it, and the Virgin Mary had withered his arm away in punishment; so despite the disapproval of the authorities, the icon was allowed to remain.

Even though the virgin goddess of wisdom who held a winged Victory in her hand had been cast out of the Parthenon many centuries before, something of her spirit remained in the mosque on the Acropolis with its icon of the Virgin, which had once been the church of Holy Wisdom. Because this was so, the women and children thought the spirit of the Parthenon would protect them, and they stayed in the shadows, telling their stories. And because he listened to their stories, the commander of the garrison decided to store not only his wives and his children in the building but also a great magazine of gunpowder.

The forces of the Holy League shelled the Ottoman position for three days, but the Acropolis held out; it seemed to be as invulnerable as the women and the children and the commander had imagined. Then, on the third day, an Ottoman deserter told the gunners about the store of gunpowder hidden inside the ancient mosque.

They took aim.

The explosion shook the earth. The middle of the mosque blew apart, and the columns of the northern and southern colonnades were flattened. Sharp shards of white marble fell on the hills a mile away
from the Acropolis. A fire raged for two days, and nearly all the people who had taken refuge in the building perished.

The general commander of the Holy League, Francesco Morosini, sent a terse report back to the Senate in Venice. “A fortunate shot reached a depot containing a considerable quantity of powder,” he wrote. “It was impossible to extinguish the flames.”

The Ottoman forces surrendered, and Morosini made his way up to the smoking ruin of which he was now the master. His men set up ropes and pulleys, and they climbed up the face of the building toward the pediment, where the images of Athene and Poseidon were locked in their ancient contest for the suzerainity of Athens. The soldiers were going to do what the Venetians always did: take the statues down and bring them back to Venice, to adorn the piazzas and palaces of their robber republic. But the pulleys came free of their housings and the ropes snapped, and Athene and Poseidon crashed to the ground and smashed to pieces. Morosini walked away from the ruin, and it was returned to the Ottomans about a year later. Other things were more important to the Holy League than a derelict mosque.