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The Acropolis of Athens
The rock above Athens crowned by the Parthenon, emblem of classical Greece
From almost anywhere in Athens, look up and the Parthenon is there, honey-colored marble on a limestone rock above a sprawl of concrete and traffic. The Acropolis, the high city, was the sacred heart of ancient Athens, and the temples raised on it in the fifth century BCE under Pericles set the standard by which Western architecture measured itself for two thousand years. Columns, pediments and proportions copied from the Parthenon turn up on banks, capitols and museums from Washington to Edinburgh. The rock has served as fortress, cathedral, mosque and gunpowder store, and it remains the most visited archaeological site in Greece, the symbol of a city that called itself the school of Hellas.
The Acropolis is a flat-topped outcrop rising about 70 meters above the surrounding city to roughly 156 meters above sea level, with a summit of about 3 hectares ringed by ancient walls. Visitors climb the west slope past the Theater of Herodes Atticus to the Propylaea, the monumental gateway, with the small Ionic Temple of Athena Nike perched on a bastion to the right. Beyond rises the Parthenon, about 70 by 31 meters, its Doric columns built with subtle curves and tilts that make it look perfectly straight. To the north stands the Erechtheion with its porch of six maidens, the Caryatids, whose originals are now in the Acropolis Museum at the foot of the rock. Below lie the Theater of Dionysus and the Agora.
People lived and worshiped on the rock from the Neolithic, and a Mycenaean palace stood here. Persian forces burned the earlier temples in 480 BCE, and Pericles launched the rebuilding in 447 BCE, with Ictinus and Callicrates as architects and Phidias overseeing the sculpture. The Parthenon later became a church, then a mosque under the Ottomans. In 1687 a Venetian shell ignited Ottoman gunpowder stored inside and blew out its center. Lord Elgin removed much of its sculpture between 1801 and 1812 to the British Museum, and Greece continues to seek their return. UNESCO inscribed the site in 1987, and the Acropolis Restoration Service has worked on it since 1975. It received about 4.6 million visitors in 2025, with timed entry and a 20,000-a-day cap.