Acropolis of Athens: 10 Trivia and Legends about the World’s Most Famous Acropolis

What are the funniest facts and strangest legends related to the Acropolis of Athens? In this article I will tell you all the fun facts about the world’s most famous Acropolis.

Are you ready? Let’s get started!

IMPORTANT! Before I begin this article, I want to warn you: the Acropolis in Athens is one of the most visited tourist attractions in Italy and around the world. With a year-round tourist season now, it is almost certain that when you want to visit it, you will find a long queue at the ticket offices. To avoid this, we recommend you buy your ticket online. Click below to book your admission and access the Acropolis in an instant.

The 10 interesting facts about the Acropolis of Athens

The Acropolis is the symbol of classicism and Greece. Surely when you think of the city of Athens the image of the sacred fortress with the Parthenon towering over the city with its towering columns will immediately come to mind.

But what is an acropolis? You should know that the Parthenon site is not the only ”acropolis” in Greece, or even in the world!

This term, comes from the union of the Greek words ἄκρος i.e., “extreme, on high,” with polis, ” city.” The word “acropolis” thus means the highest and most fortified part of an ancient city.

What makes the Acropolis of Athens so famous is surely the presence of the temple of Athena Parthenos, which once housed a gold and ivory statue of the goddess.

You may be wondering why Athena, in this article I will tell you about the legends related to the Parthenon and many other curiosities, let’s get started!

The Goddess Athena and the myth of the founding of the Acropolis

According to mythology, it is right where the Acropolis stands that the dispute between the goddess Athena and the god Poseidon over possession of Attica took place, and traces of the dispute are said to be kept within the small temple of Erechtheus. The myth relates that both Athena and Poseidon claimedAttica from Zeus in order to possess a region of the earth that could honor them.

To end the dispute it was decided that the deity who would give the inhabitants of Athens the most valuable gift would win the contest. Poseidon thus, with his trident, shook the earth and made its springs gush forth ( according to another version the god caused a horse to rise from the rock) , while the goddess Athena wielded her spear and beating it to the ground brought forth an olive tree with silver leaves. From the olives the Greeks made the precious oil, useful both as food and fuel, and their king, Cecrope, decreed Athena the winner of the dispute.

You should know that in Greece Athena was one of the most beloved deities : goddess of war and wisdom, she protected Greek cities. In the Iliad she represents one of the fiercest supporters of the Greeks during the Trojan War.

The procession of the Panathenaeans

The Acropolis represented the hub of the religious life of the city of Athens, symbolized its power and wealth, and various events took place there in which the Athenians showed their devotion to the gods, particularly Athena.

Among the many celebrations, the most important was the Panathenae. This festival was held every four years to honor the goddess Athena, with processions, sacrifices and sports competitions.

The Panathenaean festivals lasted for nine days

• During the first three days they held musical and literary competitions;
• After that, on the next three days it was the turn of gymnastic contests and horse racing;
• On the seventh day, pyrrhic dances were performed and a lampadedromy,a torch-racing competition that ended in a night vigil during which singing and dancing took place;
• Beginning at dawn on the eighth day, the procession from the Ceràmicus up to theAcropolis began, carrying the new peplos, embroidered by the noble Athenian maidens, to be worn by the chryselephantine statue of the goddess. The procession ending the sacrifice of more than a hundred animals, including cattle and sheep, whose meat was distributed to the citizenry;
• The ‘last day was devoted to a boat race.

What you see today is not the first Parthenon

The present Parthenon replaced an earlier temple, known to scholars as the Pre- or Proto-Parthenon. As archaeologist Ioanna Venieri explains, the Persians destroyed that temple and many others during the sack of Athens in 480 BC. Following the Athenian victory over the Persians, Pericles undertook a major building project, which had the Acropolis as its spearhead.

The Transformations of the Acropolis

During the Centuries the Parthenon underwent several transformations. During the Byzantine Empire it was turned into a church, under Turkish occupation the Parthenon became a mosque and the nearby Erechtheion, a harem.

The acropolis you can observe today, which seems to have come intact from the classical age, did not actually look like this. In 1832, the Kingdom of Greece undertook restoration work on the site, and the philosophy of the intervention was to unearth the monument as it had been conceived in classical Greece, demolishing all the medieval and Ottoman buildings that had been constructed in the following centuries.

The thefts of the Acropolis marbles

In the early 1800s several elements of the Parthenon and the temple of Athena Nike were removed by Count Lord Elgin and taken to London. They are preserved today in the British Museum and Greece is still demanding their return today.

You should also know, that most of the decorative apparatus you will observe inside the Acropolis are faithful copies. The remaining originals , for conservation reasons, are located inside the Acropolis Museum.

Traces of the war against the Persians

Inside the Acropolis lies an ancient war memorial. Around 480 B.C., after their victory over the Persians, who looted and burned many of the buildings there, the Athenians decided to collect what remained of their monuments and set them into a new wall, located on the north side of the Acropolis, as a memorial. The objects that now constituted debris were instead burned and deposited in deep pits, going to form an artificial plateau , this archaeological deposit is called the Persian fill and is still visible today.

Numbers of the Acropolis

A total of 150 stonemasons and 50 sculptors were employed to create the sculptural apparatus of the Parthenon. Only 30 percent were Athenians and the rest of the workers were 20 percent slaves and 50 percent meteci (free, non-citizen residents). Among the workers who worked on the construction of the Acropolis was the philosopher Socrates, who worked there as a stonemason.

As many as 13,400 blocks of Pentelic marble were used for the construction of the Parthenon alone.

The optical illusions of the Parthenon

The Parthenon is famous for being the model par excellence of Doric architecture, if you look carefully you will notice several devices that the Greek architects devised to make the temple appear more harmonious and symmetrical to the human eye, real optical illusions.

Look at the columns: you will notice that they narrow upward, this artifice is called entasis, and it serves to remedy the inevitable appearance of narrowing in the center of the shaft that would naturally occur if the column’s profile were straight, because of perspective. For the same reason, the floor is also not perfectly straight, but curves slightly upward.

It was not all white!

All the decorations on the marbles of the Parthenon and other Acropolis monuments were embellished with garish colors, and the resulting image must have been very different from what we see today.

In the past, in the Archaic age, in the time of Pericles as well as in the Hellenistic age the Greeks used colors and made use of them to paint walls, temples, statues – often using red, Egyptian blue and gold. Unfortunately, with the passage of time, the hues were not preserved, and this misled scholars and artists of the 1800s, so much so that the Neoclassicism current repurposed classical architecture as if it had always been completely white.

Conclusions

Here we come to the end of this post on the legends and curiosities related to the Acropolis of Athens. If you have any doubts, questions or know of any other curiosities, please leave a comment below and I will be happy to answer you.