The Secret Lives of Buildings: From the Ruins of the Parthenon to the Vegas Strip in Thirteen Stories Read Online Free Page A

the southern slope of the Acropolis, where he would meditate on the inviolate wisdom of Athene.
    Then, in the year of Our Lord 391, Theodosius, the emperor of Constantinople, sent a proclamation throughout his empire: “No one is to go to the sanctuaries, walk through the temples, or raise his eyes to statues created by the labour of man.” He had the festival days of the old pagan gods declared as workdays, and the doors of the temples closed.
    The Christians took possession of the Temple of Wisdom, and they turned it into a church. The
parthenon
, the room of the virgins at theback of the building, became the front porch, and the
hekatompedon
the nave of the church. They blocked up the door to the
hekatompedon
and placed their altar there, and they opened a new door where Phidias’s image of Athene had been, so that the faithful who entered the church now shook the dust off their sandals onto the pavement where the goddess had stood. The temple, whose doors had opened to the east so that the light of the rising sun would come through its doors, now faced in the opposite direction, so that the altar of the Christians faced the dawn. In a final irony, the Christians named their new church Hagia Sophia, or Holy Wisdom.
    A few decades later, the goddess of wisdom completed the Christians’ work for them. Athene appeared to Proclus in his dream and whispered an order into his ear. “Make your house ready,” she said; “they have turned me out of my temple, so now I come to live with you.” Proclus wept, and then he prepared himself. The goddess, it is said, went to live with him in his little house on the southern slopes of the Acropolis, and she was never seen again. Her empty image was removed from its sanctuary and shipped away to Constantinople by the emperor’s agents. And so the Parthenon, whose virgin goddess had been cast out of her own sanctuary, was ruined for the first time.
    Eight hundred years later, the Christian rabble of Constantinople would tear an ancient statue to pieces because they were convinced it was the habitation of a demon. It was said that this statue stood over eighteen feet tall. She wore a helmet and held a shield and spear, and a winged figure of Victory fluttered in her hands.
    1687
     
    W HEN IT WAS some twenty-one centuries old, the Parthenon was ruined a second time. A Holy League of Christians descended on Athens, now a city in the Ottoman Empire, and laid siege to the Acropolis. Cannonballs rained onto the marble, and smoke blackened the sky and choked the air. Terrified, the harem of the Ottoman garrison, who were trapped on the rock, gathered their children about them and took refuge in what was now their mosque. Holed up in the shadows as the cannonade rumbled and cracked outside, the women told their children stories to reassure them.
    One woman recounted tales from the Turkish traveler Evliya Çelebi. This mosque had been built as a madrassa by the wise man Plato long ago, she said, and he had delivered his lectures from the throne now used by the imam at prayer time. He had dwelled here with the goddess Athene, to whom he used to pray for wisdom. The mosque had been standing here for many thousands of years, the woman told her children, and it was not about to fall down now.
    This Plato had constructed the mihrab, the niche pointing toward Mecca, in sheets of alabaster, which glowed even now in the darkness of the bombardment. The women pointed at the niche: “See, it glows still; Allah has not deserted us yet.” Plato had taken the bronze gates of Troy and had made them into the doors of his Academy. “The gates of Troy, which were never breached except by treachery, will keep us safe and sound,” said the women.
    A Christian woman of the harem recounted tales from another traveler, the Italian Niccolò Martoni. Plato had lived long before the time of Jesus, let alone the prophet Muhammad, she said, and in those days many came to study the arts of wisdom in this building.