Parthenon

An earlier sanctuary to Athena Parthenos, begun on the site shortly after the Battle of Marathon around 490–488 BC, was still unfinished when the Persians sacked Athens and razed the Acropolis in 480 BC. The ruin stood untouched for over three decades, an interval attributed to an oath sworn by the Greek allies before the Battle of Plataea in 479 BC not to rebuild the destroyed sanctuaries — an oath from which Athens was released only by the Peace of Callias around 450 BC.

Pericles began the new temple in 447 BC, under the general supervision of the sculptor Phidias, with architects Ictinos and Callicrates directing the works; it was substantially complete by 432 BC, though carving of its decoration continued to at least 431 BC. Built in thanksgiving for the Greek victory over Persia, the temple doubled as the treasury of the Delian League, later the Athenian Empire.

A fire in the mid-third century AD destroyed the roof and much of the interior, and Heruli raiders sacked Athens in 276, damaging the Parthenon with most of the city's public buildings; repairs, possibly under Julian, gave it a new wooden roof in the fourth century. The temple survived nearly a thousand years until Theodosius II's edict of 435 ordered pagan temples closed empire-wide, though the precise date it stopped functioning as a temple is debated — one proposal places it at 481–484, under Zeno, after it became a focus of pagan opposition to his rule. Its cult statue was later looted to Constantinople and destroyed there, possibly during the Fourth Crusade's 1204 sack of the city.

Converted into a church of the Virgin Mary in the late fifth century, the building was reoriented to face east and became, by the eleventh century, the fourth most important Christian pilgrimage site in the Eastern Roman Empire; Emperor Basil II travelled to Athens in 1018 to worship there. Under Latin occupation it served as a Catholic church for about 250 years, during which a tower was built at its southwest corner. Ottoman forces invaded Athens in 1456 and took the Acropolis in 1458; by century's end the building was a mosque, its apse a mihrab and its tower heightened into a minaret.

During the Morean War, an Ottoman garrison fortified the Acropolis and stored gunpowder inside the Parthenon despite an explosion having already wrecked the nearby Propylaea in 1656. On 26 September 1687, a mortar round fired by Venetian forces under Francesco Morosini struck the magazine. The blast brought down six columns on the south and eight on the north, nearly collapsed three of its four walls, brought down three-fifths of the frieze sculptures, and killed about three hundred people. Morosini's attempt to loot sculptures from the wreck smashed figures from the west pediment as his soldiers tried to detach them. The Ottomans then built a smaller mosque within the ruined shell, and building material was looted from the remains over the following century.

During the Greek War of Independence the Acropolis was besieged twice; Ottoman artillery damaged the Parthenon in the second siege of 1826–27. Earlier, between 1801 and 1812, agents of the 7th Earl of Elgin removed about half the surviving sculptures and shipped them to England, now known as the Elgin or Parthenon Marbles. When independent Greece took control of Athens in 1832, the minaret's visible portion was demolished and the surviving Ottoman and medieval structures on the Acropolis were cleared away. Greece formally requested the Marbles' return in 1983 and later raised the dispute with UNESCO, which in 2021 called on the UK to resolve it; most removed sculptures remain in the British Museum, with others in the Louvre, Copenhagen and the Acropolis Museum, and only four fragments — three from the Vatican, one from Sicily — have been returned to Greece.

The Greek government began a sustained conservation programme in 1975 under the Committee for the Conservation of the Acropolis Monuments, later supported by EU funding; the effort found that iron pins added during nineteenth-century repairs, unlike the original lead-coated fastenings, had corroded and cracked the surrounding marble, and these were replaced. The last frieze slabs on the building were removed in 1993 for safekeeping in the Acropolis Museum. The Parthenon is part of the Acropolis UNESCO World Heritage Site, inscribed in 1987, and remains open to visitors along the Panathenaic Way; its west pediment, restored under the ongoing programme, was unveiled in June 2026.