The Glory That Was Greece : Restorers Battle Time and Elements to Save Ancient Acropolis

ATHENS — High above the city’s busy streets, a cream-colored crane removes a pollution-scarred block of marble from the western frieze of the Parthenon and carefully carries it to a safer haven.

The rescue operation is the latest effort in a multimillion-dollar project that eventually will preserve one of the most familiar and cherished sites in the world--the Acropolis of Athens.

But along the way, the restoration work is jarring the serenity and scenery of the historic hill and rekindling a long-simmering international debate over what to do about ancient ruins.

The ruins here date back to the 5th Century BC, when Pericles persuaded fellow Athenians to commemorate Greece’s victory in the Persian Wars by erecting a group of buildings on the Acropolis, a limestone mesa that rises more than 200 feet above the plain of Athens.

The largest, best-known of the structures built between 447 and 405 BC is the Parthenon, the majestic Doric-style temple dedicated to the goddess Athena Parthenos.

“It’s a miracle we still have the Parthenon,” said Manolis Korres, chief architect for the restoration. “So much has happened to it over the centuries at the hands of man, the elements and time.”

Various conquerors of Greece turned the Parthenon into a Roman Catholic church, a mosque and an ammunition dump.

The estimated cost of restoring the Parthenon alone is about $15 million, divided between the Greek government and the European Community.

Fire, earthquakes, wars and vandalism have taken a heavy toll on the Acropolis. The most infamous “vandal” was the seventh Earl of Elgin, the British ambassador to Constantinople (now Istanbul, Turkey). In 1801 he carried part of the Parthenon’s frieze and scores of statues and other items off to England, where they are displayed today as the Elgin marbles in London’s British Museum.

After Greece regained its independence in 1829, restorers went to work on the Acropolis. During the 19th Century, houses, medieval towers and all other traces of Roman, Byzantine, Frankish and Turkish occupation were cleared away. In the early decades of the 20th Century, the major monuments were rebuilt and shored up.

But new problems developed. For one thing, some of the restoration work turned out to be shoddy.

Worse, Athens’ soaring population--the city is home to 4 million of 10 million Greeks--brought factories, traffic and central heating. This, in turn, produced air pollution that has eaten away at the precious monuments. Statues and sculptures are especially vulnerable.

Among the victims were the caryatids, maiden-shaped marble pillars that once supported the south portico of the Erechtheion. They had to be removed several years ago and were replaced with cement copies. Five of the six pollution-scarred originals now reside in the small museum atop the Acropolis.

In 1975 a group of Greek archeologists, architects and other scholars and specialists formed the Committee for the Preservation of the Acropolis Monuments to plan a new restoration that would save the remaining treasures. The committee efforts to formulate a strategy have been made difficult because of conflicting theories about historic preservation.

On one side are those who view the Acropolis and other ancient sites as glorious ruins that should not be disturbed. They are upset by restorations like that of the Erechtheion, with its two-tone walls of old and new marble and fake caryatids.

At the other extreme are those who favor rebuilding virtually everything. This, they contend, will make the site and structures far more understandable and instructive.

Archeologist Petros Calligas, a moving force on the restoration committee and director of the Acropolis Museum, is not keen on either prospect. He calls the first “ruinmania” and says of the second, “You might as well start from scratch and build a whole new Parthenon, like they did in Nashville.”

The preservation committee has chosen a middle path. “Our guiding principle is that we will do the job in a faithful, honest way, without using large amounts of new material--10% to 15% at most,” Manolis Korres said. “If we need a small piece of new marble to fill in a gap, that’s OK, but if we must construct half a wall, no.”

As part of his effort to be faithful, Korres is committed to using every old piece of marble in its original spot. He and his crew of more than 35 stonemasons, architects, engineers and chemists spent five years studying the Parthenon, building scale models and poring over old drawings and photographs.

Using the latest technology, they are painstakingly trying to identify thousands of individual pieces of marble to help them fit together this giant, three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle.

Because of the restoration work and past damage, the 5 million tourists who visit the Acropolis each year no longer can roam freely through the Parthenon or other buildings. Nor will they probably ever do so again.

But Korres is doing his best to minimize the disruption. Scaffolding is painted creamy white to blend with the columns it entwines, and the crane that sits inside the Parthenon folds up compactly so that it is not an eyesore.

For several weeks, that crane will be busy taking down the last remaining sections of the frieze that once encircled the Parthenon and depicted gods, musicians, virgins, horsemen and animals. Like the caryatids, these sculptures will be taken to the museum for safekeeping and later will be shifted to a new, much larger museum to be built at the base of the Acropolis.

Replicas are likely to go up in place of the damaged sculptures. Someday, if Athens can conquer its pollution problem--and the city is making progress--the originals may be returned to the Parthenon.

No one is certain how long the restoration project will take. At least 10 more years, probably longer, is the estimate.

That is a relatively short wait to reclaim a treasure that has been around for more than 24 centuries.