Erechtheion

The Ionic temple on the north side of the Acropolis is the last in a series of buildings on roughly the same ground, the earliest going back to the late Bronze Age, though the evidence for them is thin: potsherds and scraps of wall beneath the foundations, then terracing, children's graves and a limestone column base. A Mycenaean well and Cyclopean walling show attempts to fortify the hill-top, which the Homeric tradition calls the strong-built house of Erechtheus. What stood there immediately before the Achaemenid destruction of Athens in 480 BC is uncertain; by one account the classical temple replaced the sanctuary of Athena Polias put up under the Peisistratids and destroyed by the Persians.

The name is itself disputed. The building has been called the Erechtheion in modern scholarship on the belief that it took in two structures mentioned by the geographer Pausanias, the Temple of Athena Polias and the Erechtheion, but in recent decades various scholars have ruled out Athena and Erechtheus being worshipped in a single building and have looked for the true Erechtheion elsewhere on the Acropolis. No consensus has been reached and the conventional name has stuck. Official Athenian decrees avoided the problem with a neutral formula, calling it the temple on the Acropolis within which is the ancient statue.

The building accounts from 409 to 404 BC have survived, dating the work with unusual security at its later end; when the project began is another matter, since no primary evidence for it exists. The date has traditionally been given as about 421 to 406 BC, and the broad consensus favours a start in 421, during the Peace of Nikias, on the reasoning that the lull in the long Peloponnesian War was the convenient moment for a major project and that building is likely to have halted during the Sicilian disaster of 413. More recent scholarship prefers the 430s, when the temple could have belonged to the programme of works instigated by Pericles.

Work seems to have ended in 406 to 405, with the last accounts drawn up in 405 to 404, though some mouldings were never finished and the bosses on some blocks were never chiselled off. The names of the architect-overseers who worked on the site after 409, Philokles and Archilochos, have come down; the identity of the architect has not, and Mnesikles, Kallikrates and Iktinos have each been proposed. By some accounts Mnesikles was indeed the designer, with the sculptural decoration entrusted to Pheidias, appointed by Pericles to adorn both this temple and the Parthenon.

The temple may have served less as the house of a single deity than as a reliquary for an assortment of religious objects, and the joint cult of Athena and Poseidon-Erechtheus seems to have been established on the Acropolis very early. The cults gathered here also took in the birth of Erichthonios from the soil of Attica and the tomb of Kekrops, mythical king and cult hero of the Athenians.

An altar of Zeus Hypatos stood before the east door, and inside the eastern chamber there would have been altars to Poseidon and Erechtheus, to Hephaistos and to Boutes, together with the thrones of the temple priests. The western section may have held the tomb of Erechtheus and the xoanon of Athena Polias, the wooden image held to have fallen from the sky rather than been made by human hands, and it housed the Lamp of Kallimachos, the saltwater well and a collection of spoils from the Persian War. Indentations in the rock were taken for the marks of Poseidon's trident, and both they and the well were held to be the tokens he produced in his contest with Athena for the country. Outside lay the sanctuary precinct, which may have held the sacred olive tree, said to have sprung up where Athena struck the rock with her spear, along with the snake pit, the tomb of Kekrops and the Pandroseion. Athena's sacred snake was believed to live there, fed on honey by the priestess of Athena Polias, a role held by the women of the ancient Eteoboutadai family, and its refusal to eat was read as a bad omen.

The later history is one of damage, repair and change of use, and much of the original arrangement was lost along the way. The first recorded fire came perhaps in 377 to 376 BC; a second and more severe fire took hold in the first century BC or earlier and was followed by a campaign of repair. By one account that fire was started by the Roman general Sulla during his raid on the city, and the repairs and remodelling that followed in the first century BC were the first the building had had. Pausanias described the building intact after those repairs. A further major destruction struck both this temple and the Parthenon in the third or fourth century AD, and whether it was caused by a Herulian or Visigothic attack or by a natural disaster is unclear. When Julian the Apostate had the Parthenon reconstructed as a pagan temple around 361 and 363, the Parthenon was the only attested site of the cult of Athena on the Acropolis, which implies that this building had by then been abandoned.

The structural changes that followed must be put down to adaptation for Christian worship. At some point in the fourth century the interior became a pillared hall with a groin-vaulted roof, and in the late sixth or seventh century a three-aisled basilica dedicated to the Theotokos, with the central portion of the east foundations cut away for a curved apse. The basilica was renovated in the twelfth century. During the Frankish occupation, from 1204 to 1458, it was deconsecrated and turned into a bishop's residence, probably for the Catholic bishops of Athens, who held mass in the Latin cathedral. With the coming of Ottoman control and the adaptation of the Acropolis plateau to a garrison, the building took on its final incarnation as the harem of the Dizdar, the fortress commander, although more recent research has questioned whether it was used as a harem at all, since Turkish sources do not record it.

Travellers' accounts are scarce before the eighteenth century, when relations between the Ottoman Empire and Europe improved and access to Greece opened up. The building north of the Parthenon was not identified with Pausanias's Temple of Athena Polias until Spon and Wheler published their account of the Acropolis in 1682, and Stuart and Revett published the first accurate measured drawings in the second volume of their Antiquities of Athens in 1787.

William Gell's drawings, made in 1800 and 1801, record the temple's condition before the destruction it suffered in the Greek War of Independence, and his work coincided with the activity of Lord Elgin, whose stripping of the Maiden Porch was at the time more controversial than his removal of the Parthenon sculptures. In 1801 one of the caryatids was taken, along with the north column of the east porch and the entablature above it, to decorate Elgin's mansion, and later sold to the British Museum; a story of the period had the five remaining figures heard mourning their lost sister in the night. His attempt on a second caryatid ran into technical difficulty; when he tried to cut the figure into pieces it shattered, and the fragments were later reassembled with cement and metal rods. Perhaps the heaviest damage came with the siege of 1826 and 1827, when the Maiden Porch and the west facade were brought down by cannon fire and the masonry joints scavenged for their lead. The building was shelled by the Ottomans during the war of independence, the roof of the north porch blown apart and much of the side walling of the naos with it.

That ruined state prompted the first attempt at reconstruction, by Kyriakos Pittakis, between 1837 and 1840. Post-revolutionary plans to clear the Acropolis and build a royal palace for the newly installed Bavarian king came to nothing, but the plateau was stripped of the post-classical work thought to obscure it, and with it went the Frankish north addition, the Venetian vault in the north porch, the Ottoman masonry at the west facade and the alterations inside. A second anastylosis was carried out by Nikolaos Balanos between 1902 and 1909; dissatisfaction with his haphazard placement of the ashlar blocks and with the steel joints he used, which caused further damage, led in 1975 to the creation of the interdisciplinary Acropolis Restoration Service, whose work continues.

Restoration work on the temple ran from 1977 to 1988 and was given a Europa Nostra award. In 1979 the five original caryatids still in Athens were taken into the Old Acropolis Museum and replaced on the porch by exact copies, the sixth remaining in the British Museum with its plinth left empty. The five were later moved to the new Acropolis Museum, the first of them on 9 December 2007, and one was reunited there with a left foot long lost and identified among the ruins in the 1980s. Damage from cement patching and from Athens's air pollution was treated with laser cleaning in 2005. By 2011 each figure was being cleaned in place with purpose-built beams that lifted the accumulated soot and grime without harming the marble, the work relayed live to museum visitors by closed-circuit television. The temple stands within the archaeological site of the Acropolis, part of a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1987.