Word: parthenon
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...past 100 years, the temple's scourges have been more prosaic, though equally serious. From the 1890s to the 1930s, well-meaning architects sought to strengthen the battered Parthenon, which originally consisted of some 12,500 white marble stones hewn from Mount Pentelicus, ten miles to the north. The restorers added new iron clamps and rods to hold the marble stones in position. But in doing so, they ignored the wisdom of the Parthenon's original designers, the sculptor Phidias and Architects Ictinus and Callicrates. During the installation of the temple's original iron reinforcing rods...
...after, set fire raging in the temple's interior, consuming the gold-and-ivory statue of fair Athena, a masterwork of Phidias now lost to the ages; or that in the 15th century, conquering Turks from across the wine-dark sea would build a domed mosque atop the Parthenon...
...Pericles' day could have imagined that the Parthenon would explode in 1687, destroying 14 of its exterior columns, when Turkish gunpowder stored inside it was hit by true-eyed artillery men of the Venetian Republic, firing near by from the Hill of the Muses? Or that in the 19th century, the seventh Earl of Elgin would carry down from the hill pediment statues and one maidenly caryatid, all doomed to sail in ships made of wood to a foreign place not loved by thundering Zeus, the British Museum...
More recently, the Parthenon has suffered from an eye-stinging yellow smog that envelops Athens for most of the year. Called the nefos (literally, cloud), it is composed mainly of sulfur dioxide, a waste product given off when petroleum is burned in autos, factories and residential furnaces. As rain and dew mix with the SO2, they form a weak sulfuric acid that turns marble into crumbling plaster...
Restoration of the Parthenon will prove a more difficult task: the 24,000-sq.-ft. building is more devastated and considerably larger than the 3,000-sq.-ft. Erechtheum. Thousands of the Parthenon's stones have toppled to the ground. After being carefully numbered and, in some cases, fitted to new pieces of Pentelic marble, the stones will be raised and stacked into position on the temple's walls. Enough old stones exist to rebuild much of the wall of the Parthenon's rectangular interior chamber, or cella...