Visiting the Acropolis: The Parthenon’s Gunpowder Disaster

Visiting the Acropolis: The Parthenon's Gunpowder Disaster

Published: August 17, 2026.

On September 26, 1687, a single mortar shell fired by Venetian artillery struck the Parthenon and ignited a store of Ottoman gunpowder hidden inside it, destroying in a matter of seconds a building that had stood largely intact for more than two thousand years. The temple had survived earthquakes, the collapse of the empire that built it, and conversion first into a church and then into a mosque. It did not survive an afternoon of war between two other powers who, by 1687, had little interest in the building’s original purpose and even less regard for its preservation. Understanding the Acropolis, Greece, today means holding two facts in mind at once: it is one of the most carefully engineered structures to survive from the ancient world, and it is also a ruin created not by slow decay but by a specific, documented act of violence. The site above modern Athens asks a real question of anyone standing on it. How does a structure built to be permanent get undone in seconds, and what does the version left behind tell us that the intact original could not?


A Rock Above the City

The Acropolis is a limestone outcrop rising roughly 150 meters above the surrounding city, with a flat summit of about three hectares. Its height and sheer sides made it a natural stronghold long before anyone built a temple there, and the earliest fortifications on the rock date to the Mycenaean period, well over a thousand years before the Parthenon existed. By the sixth century BCE, the summit held a growing collection of shrines and an earlier temple to Athena, the city’s patron deity.

That earlier building program was interrupted in 480 BCE, when Persian forces under Xerxes sacked Athens and destroyed the structures on the Acropolis, including an unfinished temple now known as the Old Parthenon. The Athenians left some of the wreckage in place for decades, a deliberate reminder of the destruction, before eventually beginning again. The rubble from that Persian sack was later built into the Acropolis’s northern retaining wall, where fragments of column drums are still visible today, embedded sideways into the fortification like a scar left on purpose.


Pericles' Ambition

The Acropolis most visitors picture today, dominated by the Parthenon, was the product of a building program launched under the Athenian statesman Pericles starting around 447 BCE. It was funded in part by the treasury of the Delian League, an alliance of Greek city-states nominally formed for mutual defense against Persia, whose funds Athens increasingly redirected toward its own civic and religious projects. The arrangement was controversial even at the time, and it says something about the ambition involved that Athens was willing to spend allied money on buildings meant to outlast any military threat.

The sculptor Phidias oversaw the project, while the architects Iktinos and Kallikrates designed the Parthenon itself, completing the main structure by 438 BCE and its sculptural decoration by 432 BCE. Inside stood Phidias’s chryselephantine statue of Athena Parthenos, a wooden core sheathed in gold and ivory that stood roughly twelve meters tall. The statue no longer survives, and no contemporary description gives us a fully reliable sense of its appearance beyond ancient copies and written accounts, but its scale alone indicates how much of the city’s wealth and identity was invested in this single building.

Alongside the Parthenon, the same building program produced the Propylaea, the monumental gateway to the sanctuary, the small Temple of Athena Nike perched on a bastion at the site’s southwestern corner, and the Erechtheion, an unusually asymmetrical temple whose southern porch is supported by six sculpted female figures known as the Caryatids. Each building served a distinct religious function, and together they turned the Acropolis into one of the most concentrated displays of architectural skill in the ancient Mediterranean.


Temple, Church, Mosque

What makes the Parthenon’s later history unusual is not that it changed hands, but how completely it was repurposed while remaining, in some form, a place of worship. By the sixth century CE, the temple had been converted into a Christian church dedicated to the Virgin Mary, with the interior reorganized to suit Christian liturgy and much of the pagan sculptural program either removed or reinterpreted. After the Ottoman conquest of Athens in 1458, the church became a mosque, and a minaret was added at one corner, visible in surviving prints and paintings from the period.

This continuity is easy to overlook, because the popular sense of Acropolis history is so thoroughly associated with classical antiquity, but for roughly two thousand years the Parthenon was in continuous religious use across three different faiths. It was not a preserved monument in the way it is treated today. It was a working building, altered as needed by whoever controlled the city, its interior walls and floor reshaped generation after generation to fit new liturgical requirements.


The Night the Parthenon Broke

By the late seventeenth century, Athens was under Ottoman control and the Parthenon, still functioning as a mosque, had also become something else: a magazine. During the Morean War, as Venetian forces under Francesco Morosini besieged the city, Ottoman defenders moved a substantial store of gunpowder into the temple, apparently on the assumption that its solid stone construction offered the safest available shelter, or possibly that the Venetians would hesitate to fire on a building of obvious religious and historical significance. Neither assumption held. On the night of September 26, 1687, Venetian artillery, reportedly directed by information from a defector who identified the Parthenon as the powder store, landed a mortar shell on the building’s roof.

The resulting explosion tore through the temple’s interior, blowing out large sections of the cella walls, collapsing the roof entirely, and toppling columns and their entablature along both long sides of the building. Contemporary accounts describe the blast as having killed a significant number of people sheltering inside, though exact figures do not survive with any confidence. What is not in dispute is the physical outcome. A building that had absorbed nearly two millennia of political, religious, and military change was gutted in the time it takes gunpowder to catch and blow.

The roofless, broken profile visitors see today is a direct consequence of that night, not of gradual weathering or simple age. It is worth pausing on this distinction, because it changes what the ruin actually represents. The missing roof and the toppled columns along the Parthenon’s north side are not the passage of time made visible. They are the record of a specific decision made by specific people on a specific evening, and the building has never fully recovered from it.


The Marbles Leave Athens

The explosion also set in motion the conditions for one of the longest-running disputes in the history of cultural heritage. Between 1801 and 1812, Thomas Bruce, the seventh Earl of Elgin and then British ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, removed a large portion of the Parthenon’s surviving sculptural decoration, including sections of the frieze, several metopes, and pedimental figures, along with one of the Caryatids from the Erechtheion. Elgin held a document from Ottoman authorities that he interpreted as permission for the removal, though the precise scope of what that document authorized has been debated ever since. The sculptures were shipped to Britain and eventually sold to the British Museum, where most of them remain on display today under the name the Parthenon Marbles, or in British usage, the Elgin Marbles.

Greece has formally requested the return of the sculptures for decades, arguing they were removed during a period of foreign occupation without the consent of the people to whom the building and its history belonged. The British Museum has generally maintained that the marbles were acquired legally under the laws in force at the time and that they serve an educational purpose as part of a world-history collection. The dispute remains unresolved, and it is not likely to resolve cleanly, since it turns partly on judgments about the legitimacy of Ottoman-era permissions and partly on differing views about where cultural heritage properly belongs. What is easier to state plainly is the sequence of events: the 1687 explosion left the sculptures more exposed and more vulnerable, and that vulnerability was part of what made their later removal physically possible.


Piecing It Back Together

Restoration efforts on the Acropolis have been underway, in various forms, since Greek independence in the 1830s, but the current, more rigorous phase began in 1975 with the establishment of a dedicated committee for the conservation of the Acropolis monuments. The guiding method is anastylosis, in which original fallen fragments are identified, catalogued, and returned as precisely as possible to their original positions, using modern materials such as titanium dowels only where the original stone is missing or too damaged to bear load. New marble is quarried, when necessary, from the same Mount Pentelicus source used by the original builders, chosen to match the color and texture of the ancient stone.

This work is deliberately slow, and it is ongoing. Scaffolding and cranes are a near-permanent feature of the Parthenon’s silhouette, a detail that surprises some visitors expecting an untouched ruin. In 2009, the New Acropolis Museum opened at the base of the rock, designed in part around the unresolved question of the Parthenon Marbles. Its top floor, aligned to match the exact orientation and dimensions of the Parthenon’s frieze, displays the surviving sculptures that remain in Greece alongside plaster casts of the pieces held in London, leaving deliberate gaps where the originals would go. The museum does not resolve the dispute. It makes the absence itself part of the display.


Visiting the Acropolis Today

Approaching the summit today, most visitors climb through the Propylaea, the same monumental gateway built under Pericles, though its northern wing was never fully completed and its later use as an Ottoman gunpowder store led to its own explosion in 1656, a smaller precursor to what would happen to the Parthenon three decades later. From there, the Parthenon dominates the skyline, its western and eastern facades still largely intact, its northern colonnade visibly reconstructed from a mix of ancient and modern stone that conservators leave slightly distinguishable on close inspection, a deliberate choice so the line between original and restored material stays legible rather than disguised.

The Erechtheion, with its six Caryatid figures on the south porch, sits a short walk to the north. The figures visible today are cast replicas; the surviving originals, damaged by pollution, were moved into the Acropolis Museum for protection, another instance of the site’s long habit of separating what remains from where it once stood. From the summit, the view extends across Athens toward Lycabettus Hill and, on clear days, out toward the Saronic Gulf, a reminder that the Acropolis was chosen for this position long before it carried any religious significance, purely because it could be defended.

The Acropolis in Athens, Greece, does not read as a single, stable monument so much as a layered record of use, damage, and repair, and that layering is arguably more informative than an intact original would be. A fully preserved Parthenon would tell visitors what fifth-century Athenians built. The building as it actually stands, scaffolded and partially reconstructed, tells a longer and more complicated story: about religious continuity across empires, about a specific act of wartime destruction whose date and cause are precisely known, and about an ongoing argument over who has the right to hold what remains of it. The history of the Acropolis is not only ancient history. Parts of it, including where its sculptures physically belong, are still being written.

Tourist Information

Location: The Acropolis, Athens, Greece. The main entrance for most visitors is on the western side, reached via the pedestrianized Dionysiou Areopagitou Street.

Opening hours: Generally 8:00 AM to 8:00 PM in peak summer season, with reduced hours (typically 8:00 AM to 5:00 PM) in winter. Hours change seasonally and around public holidays, so check the official Acropolis website before visiting.

Typical visit duration: Two to three hours for the summit itself. Visitors combining the Acropolis with the New Acropolis Museum at its base should allow at least half a day.

How to get there: The nearest metro stations are Acropoli and Monastiraki, both a short walk from the entrances. The site is also reachable on foot from most central Athens neighborhoods, including Plaka and Thissio.

Admission: Tickets are required and prices vary by season, with reduced rates in winter and free admission on certain public holidays and for specific visitor categories. Direct readers to the official Acropolis website for current ticket prices, combined-site passes, and online booking.

Accessibility: The climb to the summit is steep, uneven, and involves worn, slippery marble in places, making it difficult for wheelchair users and visitors with limited mobility. A dedicated accessibility lift on the north side of the rock provides an alternative route for wheelchair users, though it operates on a limited schedule and is sometimes closed for maintenance. The site is generally manageable for older children, though supervision is advised on the steeper, unfenced sections.

Facilities: Toilets and a small café are available near the main entrance. The New Acropolis Museum at the base of the hill has a full-service restaurant, gift shop, and additional facilities. There is no on-site parking near the summit entrances; visitors typically arrive on foot, by metro, or by taxi.

Dress code: No formal dress code applies, though comfortable, closed-toe walking shoes are strongly advised given the slippery marble surfaces.

Best time to visit: Early morning, shortly after opening, offers the coolest temperatures, softest light, and smallest crowds, particularly in summer when midday heat on the exposed rock can be intense. Spring and autumn generally offer more comfortable conditions than the height of summer.

Things to know before visiting the Acropolis:

  • The marble surfaces underfoot are naturally polished and become notably slippery when wet.
  • Shade is limited across most of the site, so sun protection and water are essential in warmer months.
  • Photography is permitted for personal use throughout the site, though tripods and commercial filming require separate permits.
  • Scaffolding and cranes are a near-permanent feature of the restoration work and will appear in most photographs of the Parthenon.
  • Security checks and bag restrictions apply at the entrances during peak season.

Nearby places of interest:

  • The New Acropolis Museum, at the base of the rock
  • The Ancient Agora of Athens
  • The Roman Agora and the Tower of the Winds
  • Plaka, the historic district beneath the Acropolis
  • The Temple of Olympian Zeus

Further Reading & Resources:

Books:

  • The Parthenon by Mary Beard
  • Who Owns Antiquity? Museums and the Battle over Our Ancient Heritage by James Cuno
  • The Parthenon Marbles: The Case for Reunification by Christopher Hitchens, Robert Browning, and Graham Binns

Documentaries and films:

  • Secrets of the Parthenon (NOVA, PBS)
  • The Acropolis: Athens’ Ancient Jewel (various broadcast documentaries covering the restoration project)

Museums:

  • The Acropolis Museum, Athens
  • The British Museum, London (holds the Parthenon Marbles removed by Lord Elgin)

Official websites:

  • The Acropolis Restoration Service (Ypourgeio Politismou / Hellenic Ministry of Culture)
  • The Acropolis Museum official website

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