A temple that had survived everything else
By 1687 the Parthenon had already lived several lives. Built for Athena between 447 and 432 BCE, it had become a church, probably in the late sixth century CE, then the cathedral of Athens, and after the Ottoman conquest of the city in the 1450s a mosque, with a minaret rising from one corner. Each change altered the inside, but the building itself stood, with its columns, its walls and a roof.
So the ruin you see on the Acropolis today was made in a single evening. How the temple got to that point, from its building to its conversion, is in the guide to the Parthenon’s dates.
Why would anyone keep gunpowder in a temple?
In 1687 Venice and the Ottoman Empire were at war, a conflict known as the Morean War. A Venetian army under Francesco Morosini, with the Swedish general Otto Wilhelm Königsmarck in command of the troops, landed in Attica and laid siege to the Acropolis, where the Ottoman garrison and many of the town’s families had taken refuge.
The defenders needed a safe place for their gunpowder. The Parthenon, with its thick marble walls and its roof, was the strongest building on the hill. There may also have been a calculation that Christian gunners would not fire on a building that had been a church for a thousand years. Women and children were sheltering inside as well. According to some accounts, a deserter told the Venetians what was stored there.
The shot of 26 September 1687
The Venetians set up their mortars on the hill of Philopappos, facing the Acropolis, and shelled it for several days. On the evening of 26 September a shell struck the Parthenon and set off the powder. The explosion destroyed most of the walls of the cella (the inner room), the roof, and the middle sections of both long colonnades, and fires burned on the Acropolis for about two days. About 300 people died.
Was the shot aimed? The sources disagree. Some say the gunners were deliberately targeting the building once they knew about the powder, others that a shell simply found its mark among many. Morosini himself described it in his report as a “fortunate” shot, fortunate, that is, for the siege, because the Ottoman garrison surrendered a few days later.
Then Morosini tried to take the sculptures
Victory did not end the damage. Morosini wanted trophies for Venice, and in 1688 his men tried to lower the horses of Athena’s chariot and the figure of Poseidon from the west pediment. The tackle failed, and the statues fell and shattered on the rock. The Venetians did carry away other pieces, including marble lions; the large lion from the harbour of Piraeus still stands outside the Arsenale in Venice.
The Venetians did not even keep Athens. Unable to hold it, they left in 1688, and the Ottomans returned. A small mosque was later built inside the ruined cella. The fate of the other sculptures is followed in the guide to the Parthenon sculptures.
So who bears the blame?
The honest answer is that responsibility is shared, and it depends on what you ask. The Ottoman garrison made the most famous building in Athens a powder magazine, in the middle of a war, with people inside. The Venetian command bombarded it, knowing or suspecting what it held, and then damaged it further by trying to loot it. Neither side set out to destroy the Parthenon as a work of art. Both treated it as a military object, which in 1687 it was.
The building had survived the change from pagan temple to church and from church to mosque. What it could not survive was being used as an arsenal in a siege. That is why the Parthenon you visit today is a frame of columns around an empty space, and why the later history of its marbles, from Lord Elgin to the restoration of the Acropolis, starts with that evening in September 1687.
Where to see it
The damage of 1687 is visible on the Acropolis itself, above all in the missing middle of the long colonnades and the empty cella. Surviving sculptures from the pediments, frieze and metopes are in the Acropolis Museum in Athens and the British Museum in London.
Sources
- History Today, “The Parthenon is Blown Up” (Months Past, September 1687).
- F. Fanelli, Atene Attica descritta da’ suoi principii fino all’acquisto fatto dall’armi venete nel 1687 (Venice, 1707).
- T. E. Mommsen, “The Venetians in Athens and the Destruction of the Parthenon in 1687”, American Journal of Archaeology 45 (1941).
- M. Beard, The Parthenon (London, 2002).
- Acropolis Restoration Service (YSMA), Hellenic Ministry of Culture.
