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

One day, a young student called Dionysius was standing in the porch when the sky went dark and the earth began to tremble. This young Dionysius felt that some event of great significance was happening. Something moved him, and he turned to the mighty column next to which he was standing. With his knife, he carved an emblem into the marble: a cross. And the day on which he carved it, the Christian woman of the harem said, was the very day on which Jesus Christ was crucified for all our sins; and she crossed herself.
    Later, when the Christians came and converted the building into a church, they repeated the little vandalism of Dionysius again and again. They worked their way around the friezes of sculpture, and they hacked off the heads and faces of the horsemen, the officials, the women bearing jars of oil and water, and the small child who carried the sacred gown; these were pagan idols and the habitation of demons. Just one sculpture—a pair of robed women, one seated and one standing—was left alone by the Christians, because they imagined that it represented the Annunciation. Centuries passed, and every passing archbishop cut his name into the marble walls, just as Dionysius had once carved his cross. In those days, the woman said, this darkened hall had beengorgeous with golden mosaic, clouded with incense, ringing with bells and chanting. There had been an icon of Our Lady that had been painted from life by Saint Luke himself, a copy of the gospels that had been transcribed by Saint Helena, the head of Saint Makarios, the arms of Saint Dionysios, Saint Cyprian, and Saint Justin, and the elbow of Saint Maccabeus.
    When the Christian woman had finished speaking, her Muslim sister picked up the story. Not so very long ago, she said, when the Roman Empire of the Christians finally fell to the forces of the prophet, the church had been turned into a mosque. The sultan Mehmet had come to see the place and had marveled at its beauty. As the Christians had done before them, the people of the prophet excised from their temple the idolatrous images they found, and the gruesome frescoes of the Last Judgment disappeared under whitewash. There was just one image that they did not dare to remove, a mosaic of the Virgin Mary in the vault of the mihrab. Once upon a time, a soldier had taken a shot at it, and the Virgin Mary had withered his arm away in punishment; so despite the disapproval of the authorities, the icon was allowed to remain.
    Even though the virgin goddess of wisdom who held a winged Victory in her hand had been cast out of the Parthenon many centuries before, something of her spirit remained in the mosque on the Acropolis with its icon of the Virgin, which had once been the church of Holy Wisdom. Because this was so, the women and children thought the spirit of the Parthenon would protect them, and they stayed in the shadows, telling their stories. And because he listened to their stories, the commander of the garrison decided to store not only his wives and his children in the building but also a great magazine of gunpowder.
    The forces of the Holy League shelled the Ottoman position for three days, but the Acropolis held out; it seemed to be as invulnerable as the women and the children and the commander had imagined. Then, on the third day, an Ottoman deserter told the gunners about the store of gunpowder hidden inside the ancient mosque.
    They took aim.
    The explosion shook the earth. The middle of the mosque blew apart, and the columns of the northern and southern colonnades were flattened. Sharp shards of white marble fell on the hills a mile awayfrom the Acropolis. A fire raged for two days, and nearly all the people who had taken refuge in the building perished.
    The general commander of the Holy League, Francesco Morosini, sent a terse report back to the Senate in Venice. “A fortunate shot reached a depot containing a considerable quantity of powder,” he wrote. “It was impossible to extinguish the