Mind, Body, Soul

The bungled Fourth Crusade of 1201-04 was intended as an assault on Islam to capture the holy city of Jerusalem, but it soon turned into an attack by western Christianity upon the capital city and dominions of Byzantanium. The shameful sack of Constantinople by the Venetians threatened Athens with the same fate when crusaders arrived at its gates. Rather than see their city destroyed, the Athenians surrendered and, for the next 250 years, they found themselves governed by a succession of Frankish and other western European authorities, while the Parthenon, now a cathedral, was presided over by a Catholic archbishop.

In 1454 the Ottoman ruler Mehmet II, the Conqueror, took Constantinople and finally brought to an end the reign of the formerly powerful Byzantine emperors. In the subsequent expansion of the Ottoman empire westwards, Athens was taken in 1456. A last resistance held out on the Acropolis for two more years, before it fell in 1458. Having been previous a pagan temple and a Christian church, the Parthenon now became a mosque. Where once, from the tower i nthe south-west corner, a bell had rung the faithful to worship, there now rose a minaret. The high alter at the end of the building was displaced by the sacred furniture of the Islamic faith, while the Christian paintings on the interior walls were whitewashed. By and large, however, there were no drastic changes to the fabric of the building, such as those occasioned by its conversion into a church. Nor did the Muslim faithful engage in the fanatical defacement of infidel images that had previous destroyed so many of the Parthenon’s sculptures.

Around 8pm on the 26th September 1687, a shot was fired from a cannon belonging to a force besieging the Ottoman garrison of the Acropolis. It entered the Pathenon through the roof and fell among a store of gunpowder, put there for safekeeping in what had seemed to the Turks the strongest part of the castle that the Acropolis had become. Such was their trust in the stout walls of the ancient temple, three hundred Turks had also taken sheltered there. They were all killed when the bomb ignited the gunpowder causing an explosion, which blew off the roof and brought down the central part of the flank walls and their external colonnades. The captain of the attacking force was a Swede, Count Koenigsmark, but the overall commander of the crusade-like alliance that had invaded mainland Greece and mounted a major assault against the Ottomans was the Venetian general and nobleman Francesco Morosini. Destruction of the Parthenon, by now the famous among European travelers, was a shocking event. Insult, moreover, was added to injury with a failed attempt by the perpetrators to lower to the ground the as yet unscathed central figures of the west pediment. The lifting tackle broke and the sculptures were smashed to pieces in their fall.

Pagan temple, then church, then mosque, the Parthenon now entered a new phase as romantic ruin. Morosini’s occupation of Athens was short-lived and the Turks returned within months to an increasingly fortified Acropolis. Within the ruin of the great temple, now open to the sky, they built a small mosque standing directly on the ancient stone-paved floor.

(ref: The Parthenon Sculptures – Jenkins, 2007)

When independent Greece gained control of Athens in 1832, the visible section of the minaret was demolished from the Parthenon, and soon all the medieval and Ottoman buildings on the Acropolis were destroyed. However the image of the small mosque within the Parthenon’s cella has been preserved in Joly de Lotbinière’s photograph, published in Lerebours’s Excursions Daguerriennes in 1842: the first photograph of the Acropolis.

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“The battery was commanded by Antonio Muitoni, Conte di San Felice, and the artificer’s name was Sergeant di Vanny.” (The Carrey Drawings of the Parthenon Sculptures, 30).

The force of the explosion led the Turks to surrender, and the Venetian general Morosini further damaged the building in his unsuccessful attempt to remove the sculptures of the west pediment. “Heard some curious extracts from the life of Morosini, the blundering Venetian, who blew up the Acropolis of Athens with a bomb, and be damned to him!” (Byron, A Self Portrait, in his Own Words, Peter Quennell, editor, Oxford Press, 1990, pg. 249).

Once the Turks were able to expel the Venetians a year later, the Acropolis was transformed into part of the city with many small homes scattered around its ground and a small mosque inside the ruined Parthenon.

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Evliya Celebi had seen the great mosques of Damascus and Edirne and Cairo and Jerusalem and Constantinople, but he said:

Presently there are well-constructed locations which have been disfigured by the wounds from the fire, but still, in the sphere of this ancient world, there is no such sparkling and luminous mosque since, no matter how often you enter it, on each subsequent entrance so many kinds of artful, individual and exemplary illustrations are evident and manifest. **