The Secret Lives of Buildings: From the Ruins of the Parthenon to the Vegas Strip in Thirteen Stories (6 page)

Other pieces of the Parthenon were scattered all over Europe. There are two heads in Copenhagen that fit onto bodies that are now in the British Museum, and there is another one in Würzburg, in Germany. There are pieces in the Vatican, in Vienna, Munich, and Palermo. There are fragments in the Louvre, collected by the defeated and disgraced French from Lord Elgin’s leavings. There are, of course, a few pieces left in Athens, and not many of those are actually affixed to what had once been the Parthenon.

Six years after he had sold his collection, the noseless Lord Elgin was once again in Athens, facing the Parthenon. Or, rather, he was in Edinburgh, the Athens of the North, facing what he hoped would become the Parthenon. A monument to the fallen of the Napoleonic wars had been proposed several years before, and this monument was, at the behest of Lord Elgin and his friends, to take the exact form of the Parthenon. The whole thing was to be constructed for £42,000—only
£7,000 more than what the House of Lords had paid for the sculptures that had adorned the original. Even so, the committee managed to raise only £16,000 for the project, and so the ten columns of the partially constructed Edinburgh Parthenon stand like a ruin in anticipation. Ever since work stopped in 1830 they have been known as “Edinburgh’s Disgrace.”

So Lord Elgin, the man who had pulled apart the original Parthenon, now presided over the broken ruin of a replica. His disgrace was complete. He retired to his estates with a substantial collection of plaster casts, and what had once been the Temple of Wisdom he pondered in its fragmented, chalky derivative. The Parthenon—whose virgin goddess had been cast out, which had ceased to be useful as a building, and whose very stones had been scattered to the ends of the earth—had been ruined a third time.

1834

W
HEN THE
P
ARTHENON
was 2,267 years old, it was ruined for a fourth time. The new king of a new nation ascended the Acropolis to survey the treasures of which he was now the master. Otto von Wittelsbach was the ruler of a country that had never existed before. It had taken fourteen years of war for Greece to come into being, and in that war the ruins of the Parthenon had acquired the status of a talisman for a nation born of ancient nostalgia. The Acropolis was besieged twice during those fourteen years, and during one siege the Turks, searching for iron to make bullets, started to break open the remaining marbles of the temple, hoping to find the metal cramps with which ancients had bound the stones of the building together. The Greeks were so horrified at this violation that they sent their enemies a consignment of ammunition, so that they could continue the battle without despoiling the building.

Once the country was free, the Greeks looked around them for a king. They found one in a younger son of the house of Bavaria, and a queen in his wife, the princess Amalia. Since there was no royal palace in Athens, many debates were held about how King Otto and Queen Amalia might live in the state befitting crowned heads of Europe. Perhaps inevitably, the people cast their eyes up to the ruined Parthenon;
and, perhaps inevitably, the German king turned to an architect of his own race to provide him with all the comforts of home.

Karl Friedrich Schinkel was the court architect of Prussia. He did not visit the Parthenon before designing his palace. He had already seen the stones of the Parthenon in London, and he had seen that aborted reconstruction in Edinburgh. He had studied Stuart and Revett, and he had read the classics. He knew all about the Parthenon. Indeed, Schinkel had already built a Parthenon or two at home in Prussia: a guardhouse on Unter den Linden in Berlin, the tomb of a Hohenzollern princess at Charlottenburg, a royal retreat for the crown prince of Prussia at Sans Souci. All of them were built in the Doric order of the Temple of Wisdom.

Schinkel’s design for the Acropolis was to transform the decrepit remnants of the Ottoman garrison into a grandiose palace. The ancient gateway was to be restored; just as it had done once upon a time, it was to lead to a gigantic statue of Athene. Next there would be a forecourt in the form of a hippodrome, and then the palace itself would unfold: a filigree Alhambra of courtyards and colonnades and fountains, where the king and his queen, Amalia, who loved roses, could walk in the shade and look out over the ramparts at the barren plains of their alien kingdom. Schinkel’s palace was a bold appropriation of a remnant of ancient Greece in the service of the modern nation. Still, just as his contemporary the great Canova had refused to raise his chisel against the marble that Phidias had touched, Schinkel’s design left the stones of the Parthenon itself unaltered: an ancient jewel in a modern setting.

But Schinkel was not the only German architect with an interest in the Parthenon. The court architect of Bavaria, like Schinkel, had built a few of them himself. When, after the defeat of Napoleon, the king of Bavaria wanted to honor the fallen heroes of his country with a monument, he commissioned Leo von Klenze; and Klenze, like the citizens of Edinburgh, knew exactly where to turn for a model. His Parthenon, the Valhalla, was set on a series of terraces above the river Danube at Regensburg. Within it, the heroes of the Bavarian—and then the German—nation are immortalized in marble. (A committee still sits to decide who will join the exalted ranks in the Valhalla; one of the latest additions was Sophie Scholl, the young woman who resisted Hitler and paid for it with her life.)

Because of his Bavarian connections, Klenze had access to the court of King Otto, and he dismissed Schinkel’s proposed palace with faint praise as “a charming midsummer night’s dream.” So in 1834, when Otto ascended the Acropolis, it was not to lay the cornerstone of a new
Residenz
, or, indeed, to do anything new at all. Unlike Demetrius Poliorcetes, the emperor Theodosius, the Holy League, or the armies of Sultan Mehmet, King Otto came to bring the repeated violations of the Parthenon to an end.

The whole event had been designed by Leo von Klenze. The king was, naturally, trussed up in all the uncomfortable corsetry and frogging of his rank; but his people, the maidens and the youths of Athens, were dressed in the simple robes of their ancestors and carried branches of myrtle. The king sat in front of the Parthenon in all his finery, and Klenze ascended a rostrum. He spoke in German:

Your majesty stepped today, after so many centuries of barbarism, for the first time on this celebrated Acropolis, proceeding on the road of civilization and glory, on the road passed upon by the likes of Themistocles, Aristides, Cimon and Pericles, and this is, and should be, in the eyes of your people, the symbol of your glorious reign . . . All the remains of barbarity will be removed . . . and the remains of the glorious past will be revealed in a new light, as the foundations of a glorious present and future.

Since that time, the Acropolis has been the ground upon which the consequences of Klenze’s plan have been played out—in constructions, reconstructions, demolitions, legal cases, learned papers, and diplomatic missions. Generation by generation, on behalf of the modern nation of Greece and in memory of the Athens of Athene, people have attempted to put the Parthenon back together again: to make it whole and perfect, like a virgin.

The first fifty years of this process involved the eradication of all of those “remains of barbarity” that had sullied the Parthenon since classical times. The guards were expelled from the little building that stood on the marble pavement of the Parthenon, and the cottages and gardens and the harem of the Turks were all demolished. When these were
gone, the remains of more ancient violations were also removed. The ruins of the minaret of the Ottoman mosque, which had once been the bell tower of the church of Holy Wisdom, were taken down; with them went the mihrab, which had once been the apse of the church, which had once been imagined to be the ancient throne of Plato.

Then the very ground itself was excavated. Until the 1830s, the Acropolis was covered in gardens, though now it is almost impossible to imagine anything growing on the bare rock scattered with broken columns and pieces of cornice. Underneath the Turkish village the Byzantine citadel was brought to light, and under that the Roman sanctuary, and under that the pavement once trod by Pericles and Phidias. By removing her history, the archaeologists attempted to restore the virginity of the Parthenon.

In 1894, when they had nearly finished, there was a terrible earthquake, and the marble columns of the Parthenon were thrown to the ground. The archaeologists surveyed the ruins of the ruins, and then they started to restore the virginity of the Parthenon all over again. They collected the pieces of architrave, the fluted column drums, and the capitals that lay around the remains of the Parthenon—those stones that had survived barbarian sack, Christian and Muslim iconoclasm, explosion, the lime kiln, and expropriation to the museum halls of northern Europe; and with this jumbled heap of broken fragments they set to work. Column drum was placed upon column drum, and then capital, architrave, metope, triglyph, and cornice.

By the end of the 1920s the peristyle of the Parthenon was almost complete. What was more, this had largely been achieved without resorting to adding new building material. The stones of the Parthenon were, it could truly be said, the same ones that had been touched by the hand of Phidias and gazed upon by the eye of Pericles. Nikolaos Balanos, the government’s director of antiquities, could justifiably claim to have restored the Parthenon to a state of integrity that it had not enjoyed since the explosion of 1687.

But when the workmen undertook the restoration of the building, they overlooked, or ignored, how perfect it had been, once upon a time. The Parthenon in her virginity had never been a mere building but a body, as refined, as whole, as strong, and as flexible as the bodies of the heroes whose divine struggle once ornamented her skin. Her
refinements were almost imperceptible to the naked eye, but their consequence is that each and every stone in the Parthenon could have only one home: no stone will fit precisely into any place other than that which had been intended for it by Phidias himself.

As they labored over their heap of broken fragments in the heat of the day, the restorers of the Parthenon had forgotten these things. Their rebuilt Parthenon might have looked very like the original Parthenon, but it was not perfect; and because it was not perfect, it was not the Parthenon.

T
HE
P
RESENT

I
N
1975, A group of archaeologists, conservationists, and technologists met in Athens. Above their seminar room the remains of the Parthenon were crumbling as fast as the meeting could deliberate. There was not much time.

Lord Byron had wished that Lord Elgin would leave the Parthenon alone and allow it to dissolve into the rain and the air. His wish was coming true. Athens, which was once a village on the Acropolis, now stretched from Pentelikon, where the marble that built the Parthenon had been quarried, to Piraeus, from which its sculptures had been shipped to London. Traffic fumes choked the vast city and poisoned the rain that fell on the Acropolis. The fragments of the restored Parthenon were held together by iron clamps that had been inserted into the columns. Before long, the iron began to rust in the poisoned air; and as it did so, it expanded. As it expanded, it cracked the white marble that contained it, and shards fell away from the substance of the building. Dark red stains dribbled down a surface that had once dazzled in the antique air. The restoration of the Parthenon threatened, quite literally, to tear the building apart. Furthermore, the marble was being transformed by the rain into gypsum, molecule by molecule. The ruins of the Parthenon were turning into the same plaster in which it had been cast by its eighteenth-century admirers; and then it was quite simply being washed away.

The committee listened to proposals to remove the remains altogether and replace them with a fiberglass replica. They discussed banning traffic around the ancient site and heard arguments for encasing
the whole building in a gigantic bubble. They debated doing nothing and letting the Parthenon dissolve into the air. They argued over the possibility of rebuilding it from scratch.

But after eleven years of deliberation, they decided to ruin the Parthenon—at least temporarily, and very, very carefully. Work is expected to be complete in 2010, twenty-four years after it began, and 2,443 years after the Parthenon had first been brought into being. Each and every block of marble is being removed from its location. The iron clamps are being extracted from each one, and they are being replaced, appropriately for a virgin temple, with titanium, a metal known for its incorruptibility. Then each and every block is being measured and analyzed, in order to uncover, if possible, the secret of its original location. Very slowly this puzzle is being resolved, and where it is possible these stones are being returned to the places intended for them by their creators.

But at the same time, all the sculptures that remain on the Parthenon have been removed to a new purpose-built museum at the foot of the Acropolis, a tomb where age and air shall not wither them. At the heart of the museum, the celebrated French architect Bernard Tschumi has designed a great glass atrium whose size and proportions exactly match those of the virgin temple. This phantom Parthenon remains empty, for it has been designed to receive all those sculptures in foreign captivity—in London, Paris, Palermo, Würzburg, Vienna—should they ever return to the city that made them. Then, perhaps, Holy Wisdom will herself return to her house.