1668: The Parthenon as Monster Manual

George Wheler's Athens, 1676 (via Surprised by Time)

How did people experience archaeological sites in the age before archaeology? We like to think that sites we know well have 'obvious' meanings, but it's not always so. Take the great Ottoman traveler Evliya Çelebi, who found first himself at Athens - then barely a village - in the hot summer of 1668.

When Evliya saw the Parthenon, he saw a mosque with a minaret, surrounded by 46 columns, and for most of the way around, the space between the columns and the walls was open to the sky, not lidded over. He saw sculptured scenes on the metopes between the tops of the columns, and more scenes around the top of the cella. Our interpretations are dominated by archaeologists, but Evliya was under no such handicap. The sculptures he saw contained fairies, angels, dragons, elephants, rhinoceri, giraffes, scorpions, crocodiles, thousands of mice, cats, ghouls, cherubs, and many many other kinds of creatures from this world and others in processions: one of the saved in Paradise, the other of those petrified in Hell.

This reconstruction of his experience, from Diana Gilliland Wright's wonderful blog on Greece in the 15th century, exposes how modern is our understanding of the mysterious place-time called 'Classical Greece'.


More fantastic than it looks.

I love this vision of the Parthenon as a fantastic bestiary, a Monster Manual if you will. You could tell stories about it without being an 'expert' or a trained tour guide, and find ways of fitting the building organically into your life experience. To me, it's a little sad that the Parthenon - and other monuments like it - have become places whose meaning is controlled by academic research. People make culture by telling each other stories about places. When you take away their right to tell stories - take away the element of fantasy - you strip away their ability to engage with the environment. If you take away the fantasy, it becomes really boring to visit archaeological sites.


The Parthenon metopes, as seen by Evliya.

There's a lot of talk in archaeology about "multivocality", or including non-experts in storytelling about the past. Of course, almost no one actually does it.

The rest of Evliya's stories about the Parthenon and Athens are fascinating. He reports that Athens was founded by Solomon, and describes the ceiling built for the Byzantine cathedral of the early middle ages:

The ceiling Evliya saw was made of cypress, gilded and painted. This was not the lid of marble coffers constructedby Iktinos and Kallikrates. At some time in the unwritten history of Athens between about 250 and 550 -- Evliya said it was on the night of the birth of Mohammed -- there was a catastrophic fire in the cella. The gold and ivory Athena was consumed, and the marble lid came crashing down, bringing down most of the interior structure with the double levels of columns... The Christians took over a shell, not Pericles' Parthenon.

In a sense, there was no such thing as the Parthenon until the 17th or 18th century: it was the church of the Virgin of Athens, then the Friday Mosque after the Ottomans took over the city. The concept of the "Parthenon" had no relationship to the experience of the users of the building, and had to be constructed over centuries. With, needless to say, mixed results.

Read the rest of the post over at Surprised by Time, it's great. It gives you a real sense of the history we lost in the mad rush to purge modern Greece of its Byzantine and Ottoman heritage.