In the course of two centuries of Turkish rule, no foreign intervention had to be fought off, with the exception of the short and insignificant expedition of Venetians several years before the Acropolis was turned into a Turkish fortress. The ambitions of the maritime republic revived after the rout of the select Ottoman forces at Vienna in 1683. That distant battle decided the fate of the most famous building on the Acropolis.
In the spring of 1684 there is a severing of relations between Venice and Turkey. A year later, in the summer, the Venetian army under the command of Francesco Morosini lands on the Peloponnesus, winning a number of victories and finally acquiring domination of the entire peninsula. Morosini’s military forces were led by officers of various nationalities: Swedes, Germans, but also Frenchmen. Count Otto Wilhelm Koenigsmarck, the son of a famous commander in the Thirty-Year War, distinguishes himself in these military operations. His wife is accompanied on the expedition by the dame de compagnie Anna Akerhjelm, whose diaries and letters are a valuable source for learning about the stages of this unfortunate expedition.
Control of the Peloponnese peninsula did not satisfy the Venetians, particularly as the Turks were using a defensive strategy. A consequence of the war is a broadening of the conquests, and Morosini’s military staff considers two projects: the first involves an attack on the island of Euboea, the second the conquest of Athens. In the end the second plan is adopted. The Turks prepare for a siege of Athens and strengthen their defensive positions. The temple of Athena Nike falls victim to these operations, razed by Turkish engineers to make place for a bastion on which a battery of arms is placed. Material from the temple is used to strengthen the fortifications.
The Venetians carry out a cunning war maneuver which is meant to suggest to the Turks that the target of their attack is the island of Euboea. In fact they land at Piraeus and Morosini’s army, meeting no serious resistance, draws near to Athens, the main point of defense. The Venetian artillery and land forces close a circle around the fortress. Both sides of the battle prepare themselves for a long and exhausting siege.
The mortar fire on the Acropolis has the character, if one may invoke terms of modern warfare, of a war of attrition, a steady barrage. However, on September 26, 1687, a shot fired from the fortifications near the monument of Lysicrates goes through the roof of the Parthenon and causes a powerful explosion. Twenty something columns are blown to bits, as well as a huge part of the architrave, the vault, the roof, and the walls of the naos. The Turkish pasha, chief of the garrison and of many soldiers, perishes under the rubble. Three days later a flag with the lion of Saint Mark flutters over the pitiful ruins.
The victory of the Venetians was clouded by a sense of guilt. Count Koenigsmarck was by no means a soulless general. In his youth he had received a solid education and at the university of Leipzig he had given a Latin discourse on the sorry fate of Athens, surrendered to the hands of barbarians. History forced him to be the one who dealt his adored city the most painful blow. Anna Akerhjelm writes “how sincerely and deeply the Count regrets having razed the beautiful temple of Minerva that stood for three thousand years” (a minor chronological inaccuracy) and expresses the conviction that it will never be rebuilt. There is much hypocrisy in this. There are well-founded suppositions that Greek spies informed Koenigsmarck of what was in the Parthenon, and that the fatal shot was not an accident.
From the heaps of rubble which now constitute the Acropolis, Morosini wants to bring to Venice the central fragment of the Parthenon pediment, representing the quarrel of Athena and Poseidon. In a report to the Senate he writes: “Foreseeing the abandonment of Athens20, I took the thought of collecting a few of the prettiest decorations that might add to the glory of the Republic. To this aim I made efforts to dismantle a statue of Jupiter and bas-reliefs of two magnificent horses from the façade of the temple of Minerva, where the most beautiful sculptures are. But as soon as the removal of these sculptures was initiated, everything collapsed from the great height and it is a miracle that the workers did not meet with a great misfortune.”*
The conquest of Athens by Morosini was also nonsensical from a strategic point of view. The Venetians withdraw from the city, taking with them a part of the local Christian population. The Turks return to deserted Athens and fortify the Acropolis once again. In the middle of the devastated Parthenon, as if in a cage with its bars torn out, they build a small mosque without a minaret.
The metamorphoses of Athens or the Acropolis alone across the centuries are difficult to study because of the almost complete lack of iconographic material. Medieval and Renaissance sketches give a quite fantastic picture of Athens, portraying it as a Flemish seaside town with Gothic churches or as a gloomy northern castle. On maritime maps Athens is called Setina, and the Acropolis seen from the sea was nothing but a point of orientation.
Travel to Greece and description of the monuments preserved did not become possible until the seventeenth century, when first France and then England opened diplomatic relations with the High Porte26. Missions are established in Athens which we might now call consulates, with a political and commercial character. At that time the people who constituted a sort of French “colony” could be counted on the fingers of both hands: a few missionaries, a stray gunsmith, and a couple of persons of indeterminate profession. It was in effect impossible to visit the Acropolis, or at least extremely difficult, as the Turks did not let foreigners into the fortress for fear of spies.
For that reason, the accounts of stubborn travelers who managed to put together descriptions and maps of Athens and the Acropolis in circumstances of personal danger rouse admiration. Let us imagine these enthusiasts: they journeyed for long days on a donkey’s back, sleeping in abandoned shepherd huts in the mountains, until at last they came to the city of their dreams. Here began complicated negotiations with the commander of the fortress, buttressed by sacks of coffee and fat domestic fowl. Finally, permission to visit, laced with an array of warnings and limitations. Then they bustle hurriedly among the Turkish tents, military buildings and temples, under the vigilant eye of distrustful soldiers, with their measuring instruments, sketchbooks, and indispensable Pausanias, the only Baedeker for over ten centuries. Everything depended on the moods of the fortress commander and his soldiers.
Two members of the Dilettante’s Club in London, which sponsored many archaeological expeditions in the East, the gentlemen Stuart and Revett, carried out measurements of the ancient Athenian monuments without obstruction, but the Englishman Vernhum21 and the Frenchman Robert de Dreux got rocks thrown at them and the threat of gunfire when they were measuring the theater of Herodes Atticus.
The draughtsman Edward Dodwell gives an amusing description of his adventures. He worked on the Acropolis using a camera obscura—the prototype of a photographic camera which produced a diminished image of a building and thus allowed him to preserve the precise proportions of the recreated monuments in his sketches. “One day when I was drawing the Parthenon with the aid of my camera obscura, the commander of a garrison asked me with disquiet what kind of magic tricks my strange machine could do22.” Dodwell tries to explain and demonstrate the workings of his gadget. The Turkish officer is plainly terrified. “Observing this […] I changed my tone and threatened him that if he obstructed and molested me, I would shut him up in my black box.” From that day onward Dodwell worked without being disturbed.
Among the travelers who passed on valuable accounts of the Acropolis from the time before Morosini’s bombs hit it, it is worthy mentioning the Jesuit Babin and the Lyon doctor and lover of Antiquity, Jacob Spon. Babin describes the Parthenon with particular precision, which is of extraordinary value to us, also because Pausanias (as we know a lover of curiosities) in his work passes over the most beautiful temple on the Acropolis in silence. For the French Jesuit it is the embodiment of perfection, aesthetically superior to the Hagia Sophia in Constantinople, and the sculptures of the frieze and pediment cannot be compared with any work of art co
ntemporary with the author. For a time dominated by the Baroque style, Babin’s view is exceptional and almost provocative in relation to the tastes of his age.
Jacob Spon’s three-volume report25 on his Greek peregrinations was published in Lyon in 1678. Connoisseurs maintain that it was “the first modern journey to Athens worthy of the name.” It is easy for us now to enumerate the mistakes and inaccuracies of this educated traveler, such as his confusion of the two pediments of the Parthenon and worse, ascription of them to sculptors of the age of Hadrian. Greece was a country untouched by architects. Spon’s book quickly became very popular in Europe and it was not absent from Koenigsmark’s trunk, as Anna Akerhjelm remembers.
In the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris a folder of sketches is preserved. A conservationist from the Napoleonic era gave it quite an odd title: “The Temple of Minerva in Athens, built by Hadrian, sketched on the orders of Monsieur Nointel, ambassador to the High Porte, before the temple was razed by the Venetians.” The Marquis de Nointel was without a doubt one of Louis XIV’s most able and resourceful diplomats. After dealing with complicated relations in the Turkish capital, he sets off on a journey to Greece accompanied by a large retinue. He arrives in Athens in the summer of 1674.
“I entered the treasure house (the Acropolis) where these wonders are kept for the first time amid festive cannon fire and returned four times incognito in order to be able to better admire and familiarize myself with the beautiful sculptures, which my painter recreated very well.”
The drawings of the Parthenon—by the hand of Jacques Carrey—are no masterpieces, and all the better for that, for an artist with imagination would not have been so precise. They were doubtless made in a rush, in an awkward position, without any scaffolding to facilitate things, but their value as documents is inestimable.
Nointel was certainly a sincere admirer of Ancient works and his concern for their fate, as well as his less disinterested motives, comes through in the ambassador’s reports. “The originals absolutely deserve to be placed in the state rooms or galleries of His Royal Highness, where they would enjoy the care with which His Majesty surrounds art and learning […]; then they would be beyond the reach of the desecrations and insults of the Turks, who consider it praiseworthy to hack off the noses or other parts of sculptures to avoid idolatry.”
The sketches in the folder executed during Nointel’s journey show that many of the statues on the pediment of the Parthenon were indeed damaged, but the main body of sculpture—if one may call it that—was preserved intact.
A century later Count Choiseul-Gouffier was appointed the French ambassador to Constantinople. As a twenty-four-year-old youth he made a journey to Greece, which he describes in his notable book Voyage pittoresque dans l’Empire ottoman27, en Grèce…An educated humanist, a member of the Académie d’Inscription, later the Académie Francaise, he dreamed as Nointel did of acquiring a collection of Greek sculptures for France. In Athens he had an agent who acted for him, Louis Fauvel—a consul, painter, and draughtsman. In one of his letters the ambassador orders Fauvel to acquire one of the caryatids from the Erechtheion, and in another he writes quite openly that his agent should not miss any occasion to plunder whatever could be plundered. The fruit of these efforts was extremely poor; probably just one metope from the pediment knocked off by a storm and now kept in the Louvre.
What the French failed to achieve was accomplished by a man whose name provokes the wrath of Hellenophiles to this day: Thomas Bruce Elgin28. Byron said of him with biting irony: “Quod Gothi29 non fecerunt, Scotus fecit.” Appointed the English representative to the High Porte in 1789, Lord Elgin took on the task of moving the sculptures of the Acropolis “to a safer place” with enormous energy, mobilizing all the political and financial means available to him. He managed to obtain permission from the Turkish authorities to make plaster casts and to remove stones with inscriptions and certain minor fragments of sculptures. Scaffolding rises around the Parthenon. Two Italian architects, two specialists in plaster casting (also Italians), the Russian painter Fyodor Ivanovich, somewhat rudely called “Lord Elgin’s Kalmuk,” and dozens of laborers under the direction of the painter Lusieri30 went to work. The most intensive period of work falls between 1801 and 1803. These “pieces of stone” mentioned by the Turkish permit31 can be admired today in the British Museum in London. It is in fact a vast collection, composed of twelve large fragments of the pediment, fifteen metopes, and fifty-six bas-reliefs from a frieze representing a pan-Athenian procession.
Elgin’s escapades could form the backdrop for a fascinating novel: the lord’s arrest in France, Lusieri’s flight at the outbreak of war with the Turks, the wreck of the sailboat transporting the priceless cargo and the retrieval of the sculptures by sponge divers; then finally the polemics and discussions dragging on in Parliament and the press for many years, weighing the moral, aesthetic, and financial aspects of the whole affair. In the end it was not until 1816 that the English state purchased the collection (Elgin demanded a hundred thirty-six thousand pounds) for the sum of a hundred thirty-five thousand pounds sterling. It was a tremendous sum for those days, and a section of the British press gave vent to irritation, portraying John Bull in satirical cartoons amid his impoverished family, which is crying: “Don’t buy those stones, Pa, give us bread.”
We have said that consideration was also given to the aesthetic value of the sculptures of Phidias and his school. It may be assumed that if the marbles acquired by Lord Elgin had derived from the Hellenistic era, the British government might have been less tightfisted.
There were many enthusiastic voices, but a commission composed of the best British artists of the time judged the work of Phidias and his school to stand just below the Apollo Belvedere or the Laocoön group.
At the turn of the eighteenth to the nineteenth century a new kind of tourist appears in Greece. Many sketches represent an exalted youth dressed in a black cloak, leaning on a broken column and gazing, melancholy, at a scattered herd of sheep among the marble ruins. “O Solon! O Themistocles! A commander of black eunuchs rules over Athens and all the cities of Greece.”
This cry escaped from the breast of François-René de Chateaubriand32. The author of The Spirit of the Christian Faith stopped one day in Sparta and four days in Athens on his journey from Paris to Jerusalem (undertaken in 1806). Posing neither as an archaeologist nor as a sociologist, nor as an art historian, he left us pages in his Itinéraire de Paris à Jérusalem which in an incomparable manner evoke Athens a dozen or so years before the end of its enslavement to Turkey.
It is early morning. “[…] Athens, the Acropolis, and the fragments of the Parthenon are colored the loveliest shade of peach blossom; the sculptures of Phidias have stirred, struck lengthwise by a golden ray; the motion of shadows made the bas-reliefs seem to move on the marble; in the distance the sea and Piraeus were flooded with white light; a Corinthian palace reflected the radiance of a new day; it shone on the western horizon like a cliff of crimson and fire.”
Chateaubriand was by no means merely a painter of moods. In the company of consul Fauvel—that incomparable connoisseur of Athenian antiquity—he came here to acquire “a clear sense of the buildings, skies, sun, perspectives, earth, sea, rivers, forests and mountains of Attica.” He is happy to have been able to correct the image he carried within him, to fill it out with color and scent, and light.
He is struck above all by the power and harmony of the Parthenon. He admires Iktinos, who managed to unite Doric gravity with Corinthian lightness of construction, setting heavy baseless columns on the three massive steps of the stylobate, which gave the temple both serenity and grace. He rightly says that the harmony of the whole is the result of a feel for the proper relations of architecture and its environment, as well as the perfection of the separate parts.
Chateaubriand’s account, his precision, interest in technical details, and the literary excellence of his descriptions put him in the first line of travelers to Greece in the
“pre-archeological era.” He did not avoid all errors (how easy it is to hold them against him now), as he, prompted by Spon’s account, ascribes the sculptures of the Parthenon pediment to artists from the age of Hadrian. But guided by an accurate intuition he also says that it is impossible that Phidias would have left both pediments bare.
Sympathy for the fatherland of Europe held in bondage, repeated by so many Romantics, gives rise to the following kind of scene from Chateaubriand’s pen: “Dizdar, or the commander, personifies the monster guarding Solon’s people. He lives in a citadel filled with masterpieces of Phidias and Iktinos without even wondering what kind of nation left these remnants, not daring to leave the hovel which he built amid the ruins of Pericles’s edifice; only at times does this soulless tyrant drag himself to the door of his hideout, sit cross-legged on a dirty divan and let the smoke of his pipe rise up between the columns of Minerva’s temple, gazing mindlessly at the coast of Salamis and Epidauros.”
In the spring of 1821 a Greek rebellion against the Turks breaks out. One should not imagine that in the minds of those who grabbed their guns the idea of eternal Hellas—the Greece of the philosophers and artists—was any kind of inspiration or motor for action.
One Philhellene observes with melancholy that in no age was the Greek people so indifferent to the surviving remains of the ancient monuments as in the quarter century before its liberation. The Greek rebels did not fight in the name of Pericles but in the name of the Nazarene and the four Evangelists. In the course of a dozen or more centuries—as someone rightly said—the eastern Church had preserved its sense of separateness as salt preserves a fish.
Athens was not even an important strategic point anymore. It was a small town that barely counted a few thousand inhabitants. At the time of the fighting the city and the Acropolis citadel pass many times from one side to another. But these are struggles over a symbol, a banner. The fate of the war was decided on other battlefields.
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